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.
"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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
No, that's not what the strategy is and they're quite open about it - the strategy is to maximize user consumption for every user, because that keeps them subscribed. I think a lot of people think that they use sophisticated analytics and machine learning etc to decide what to greenlight, but they don't. They use the judgment (and politics, and egos) of Hollywood studio executives (and often the same Hollywood execs that a few years ago were employed in "legacy" media). Although I will grant that they've been innovative in producing/distributing international content, this is really just globalization and labor arbitrage (it is cheaper produce content not in Hollywood, that's not news - they just spend the extra $$$ localizing international content to different global target distribution markets but again, this flow has happened forever, it's just typically been Hollywood -> localization -> foreign market rather than foreign production -> localization -> Anglophone market).
Where analytics and ML does come into play is deciding which things out of their enormous catalogue they push to individual users at any one time - that process is highly reactive, individualized, dynamic - that's why strange and seemingly random media become big hits on Netflix while being largely ignored by the commentariat, and vice versa, why series with dedicated fanbases don't get renewed (the analytics tell you that, despite the apparent success, further investment will not improve user engagement with the platform by enough to be worth the spend).
> Where analytics and ML does come into play is deciding which things out of their enormous catalogue they push to individual users at any one time […]
Except they don't. Only Netflix has a vague reminiscence of ML/analytics-driven recommendations. The rest of streaming platforms offer anything but personalisation, which is particularly bewildering considering the financial and engineering resources available to the streaming behemoths. I do not have subscriptions for each streaming platform out there, but out of the several ones I do, Disney+ and especially Prime are the worst offenders that throw random trash either into the home screen or into the «personalisation» section, e.g. «because you have watched The Expanse, we thought you would like an NBA season / rugby World Cup» and stuff like that. You would think that obsessively clicking the «Like» button after watching something you actually liked would influence the personalisation, except it does not. Disney+, again, fills up the home screen with garbage I would never fathom could even exist.
The thing is that with the currently available technology, building a capable (it does not have to be perfect) recommendation is not that hard. At work, we almost daily design and build solutions that employ semantic similarity search / something, and with the current crop of multimodal LLM's that can generate vector embeddings with ease, it is relatively easy to build out a recommendation engine or algorithm tailored for the needs of a specific streaming platform.
Granted, specific optimisations are required and there will be unique new challenges in there; however, crafting such a solution is well within the realm of possibility. And the amount of money required is not even that high considering that many building blocks are available as mature, managed services, or creating a bespoke and tailored in-house solution does not require starting off from the clean slate by leveraging the prior art. That was not the case, say, back in 2018, but in 2025 it is a reality. For a bizarre reason that is beyond my comprehension, almost no streaming platforms do that.
> […] that process is highly reactive, individualized, dynamic […]
That is the aspiration and the high ideal; however, something else is going on, and it is not entirely inconceivable that the marketing department is complicit in the foul play.
To be clear, I was talking about Netflix, not Disney+. That's a completely different company with a different model and conflating the two is your mistake, not mine.
> 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.
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.
Same here. I never subscribed to Netflix or Disney+ for the intended purpose of continually paying for it in perpetuity - it was always to watch the one show I want (in <1mo) and then immediately kill it.
This doesn't really mesh with SaaS economics, or in this case how Netflix spends billions on producing their own content. A set of subscribers that don't use the service is locally maximized but has a lower lifetime total value. It is much easier to model & optimize your LTV with given costs (ex: assume the user watches 24/7) and then figure out "how do I make a user watch Netflix 24 hours a day?" than it is to solve "how do I grow my constantly churning user base?". Keeping customers is much less expensive than winning new ones.
Netflix is big and surely not monolithic so there may indeed be some people or even departments that think that way, but the content production is not thinking that way. They genuinely want to create amazing content that is compelling. There is also the very real need to have their own content as well now that the networks are selling streaming services themselves and damn near everything is now exclusive to whatever streaming service
> 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).
But in spirit, you would probably only describe it as truly "working" (in the sense of accomplishing its claimed purpose) if as soon as it ran out of things to suggest cancelling, it suggested cancelling itself. Which it doesn't. So no.
Same as a dating site/app — a dating system truly designed in spirit to accomplish its claimed purpose, would seek to minimize the time anyone spends using the app before
uninstalling it. And no such site/app exists. (Although it could — as this is basically the business model of a professional matchmaker, where you pay a large lump sum up-front and then they're beholden to do unbounded work to find you a happy relationship. So they seek to minimize how much of their time you spend, by finding you that happy relationship ASAP.)
The professional matchmaker angle as a contrast is fascinating. The subscription model not only removes the incentive to provide quality quickly -- it reverses it. Doing a worse job is encouraged if you can leverage that to convince people that the future (which is only available by continuing your subscription) is worth waiting for. It's also more attractive because it has smaller up-front costs for the consumer.
It would be an interesting world if we outlawed auto-renewal for services that you need to actively use in order to get any value from them. When you're paying for Netflix, you aren't paying to watch movies, you're paying for /access/ to movies you can watch. The flip side is that the maximum potential service quality would decrease if revenue decreases -- which is also why ad-supported services prevail. If all players are subject to the same rules, that would either end up as a decrease in licensing costs or a focus on quality content over quantity. If they aren't producing exclusive content, they are beholden to the quality of the market. Either way, that should encourage quality content to be made over saturating the market with content.
Unfortunately, pipe dreams will remain pipe dreams.
Similar to if you engaged a realtor on a monthly subscription instead of a (roughly) fixed commission based on % of sales price - incentivizes them to spin things out.
Having legislators outlaw bad business practices is in general very slow; if competition works then it seems there should be a niche for a lump-sum/fixed commission-based dating service where they match you with the people in their database most likely to actually be compatible with you. But now that creates a new problem of measuring "successful" outcomes in matchmaking, which will be near-impossible to measure and easy for all parties to game, if it's mostly transacted by app. But it sounds in principle like the business model for traditional introduction-based matchmaking (the matchmaker only gets a good reputation if they have some successes, and most prospective customers will only be willing to pay $ for say 3-12 months).
EDIT: makes me wonder: eHarmony never opened matchmaking offices.
I only use it for keeping an eye on my budget, I don't really trust automated systems to cancel things for me. But it does let me know what to cancel manually.
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.
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.
> 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.
I used to own a part of the Facebook homepage and maximizing its metrics was my job.
They told us they cared about wellbeing. I made a feature that demonstrably improved wellbeing, and we had lots of data and surveys etc to prove it.
But it decreased watch-time on shortform (what we used to call TikTok style) videos so the Director made me delete it. That started my disillusionment process that eventually made me quit.
While it initially makes a reasonable proxy you end up polluting the measurements gradually by engineering for maximum screen time. The Artificialy created screentime is increasingly unrelated to satisfaction and ultimately not at all.
Take how Google sorts results by popularity while it is also the main source of "popularity".
I wouldn’t say they are hardly incentivized now. They were never incentivized.
What company cares about a users well being? The only companies that might care are ones where the population growth rate of humanity is the bottleneck on their new user acquisition and those companies are slowly morphing into sovereign nations already
Indeed. It was however expedient to pay lip service to the idea of promoting user wellbeing at various times (i.e. shortly post-Cambridge analytica at Facebook)
Netflix could probably get enough goodwill by just automatically not charging people who didn't use their service at all as to be worth it. No hassle, we just keep rolling your subscription over until you watch something again (of course they make interest in the month you paid but didn't use services - that $0.05 should pay for the email and other infrastructure costs needed for a customer that doesn't even use the service). The real benefit of this is when someone does watch something there is no hassle - they are already subscribed and so they don't even think about should the re subscribe.
Of course with their ad supported tier they probably don't agree.
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.
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?
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.
>Side note: I discovered by accident last week that uBlock Origin eliminates ads on Amazon Prime Video too.
It works on Hulu too. You get a box at the beginning of the show saying "please turn off your ad blocker" but once you click OK it never comes up again.
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)
Good question. I think it's really just status quo. I got Peacock for free thru Xfinity and it was ad supported, but when I left Xfinity I just kept the same tier. Same with Hulu; my wife had ad Hulu before we got married and when we merged finances I had to reason to upgrade. But Netflix/HBO with ads just seems weird to me.
I'm on the ad-free tier for Peacock and have honestly considered downgrading because most of what I watch there is live sports, and they have natural breaks in play that the linear broadcast fills with ads, whereas Peacock on the ad-free tier fills with extremely irritating repeating elevator music. It's bad enough that I'd rather see the ads.
Wow that is really irritating! I used to get peacock for free with Xfinity until I fired them, but I still watched (nin-live) shows so I kept the cheapest tier. Interestingly enough, when I watch on my TV they forget to show me ads or something.
Spotify is doing this as well. If they can "downgrade" users from paid all-you-can-eat plans to cheaper plans that also serve ads they're overall way more lucrative.
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.
>Only Netflix is chickenshit and they haven’t figured out that nobody watches the first season of a Netflix show until the second is announced because they know Netflix cancels shows all the fucking time.
What's funny is that HBO is worse about that, but everyone watches the new HBO shows because they are big budget and look really appealing.
Netflix is also really bad about taking way too long to make additional seasons even if they announce them it's still forever before they come out.
>> but everyone watches the new HBO shows because they are big budget and look really appealing.
This doesn't feel as true anymore. There's still the odd HBO blockbuster but they're producing a lot more garbage as they search for the next hit. And they're not immune to the Marvel approach of strip mining a profitable franchise well past there being any gold left.
Maybe it's confirmation bias, in that I'm interested in the pitch for fewer HBO shows and so I don't feel it when they get cancelled after a half-assed attempt.
Netflix shouldn't bother signing shows without a 2 year contract at this point.
Not directly, the there is a strong correlation between use of the product and retention. Ideally yes users that pay but don't use are the best, but those are rare. The cost of delivering the service on an incremental basis is also low. So all in all, they want users to be using the product as much as possible.
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.”
> 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.
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.
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...
I don't really care for these type of ads as I see them everyday. They're already plastered on products I use. I would be grateful if ads on website were that static.
GP responded to a comment about broadcasts, not paintings. I think the GP wasn't so far off. If you are not selling products you are still presenting viewpoints, experiences, and ideas.
product placement is the very foundation of TV, it's just a little more subtle now. Originally shows were brought to you by XYZ and had an intermission to advertise their products. Radio did this as well.
That is not product placement, per my working definition. Product placement is inserting the advertising into the art, where it is not clearly labeled or discernible as advertising.
On the TV show White Collar, the main character is never, shown driving a car, or talking about them, or having any interest in cars whatsoever. He walks around New York City, or is driven in a government employee's car. Yet, in one of the later seasons, he compliments on specific features of a car he is being driven, and has a dialogue about it with another character.
Extremely jarring for anyone paying attention, and obviously advertising. Product placement is sacrificing some portion of the art in exchange for money (or products/services which otherwise reduces production cost).
>"Shoving content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase" maximizes eyeball time which maximizes ad dollars. Netflix's financials are a bit more opaque but I think that's the key driver of the carcinisation story here,
Non sequitur. For the longest time, Netflix had no advertisements. Do they even now? (I don't subscribe... all their shows end up on my Plex anyway.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Which is why back in the 1930's, there's anti-trust legislations preventing movie studios from owning cinemas. This prevents the ownership of IP from dictating prices in the cinema.
The situation with streaming platforms are exactly equivalent, and these content production studios have learnt to prevent this sort of anti-trust legislations from forming.
Large aggregation is also to a certain degree a moat. Most creators have quickly found that people won't pay for one creator's content unless that creator is a huge volume creator (at the scale of maybe Disney). No one subscribes to a platform with 20 movies and 5 TV shows.
Dropout.tv is a counterexample. They're not 20 movies and 5 TV shows, but they're closer to that than they are Disney. There are also all the people who make a living on Patreon.
> 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.
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.
Love How to sell drug online (fast), surprised to see it listed here tho 'cause I've never heard anyone talk about it. Considering it got 4 seasons, it must be popular tho.
And yeah, Bridgerton, Wednesday, Emily in Paris, and 3 Body Problem each certainly take their moment at least in my circles.
There was the original Netflix-produced hit, House of Cards. Making a Murderer was also huge (although I didn't watch it). And then Tiger King blew up during the pandemic (although again, I never saw it myself).
I think the Jeffrey Dahmer one was also big, because there have been so many stupid memes about him since then, from people who weren't around to hear about him on the news.
> Are they doing something different, or is it just that their customers have to choose them repeatedly?
I guess it's market-related. Your remarks remind me of Behringer. They make products for the music and audio enthusiasts. They have decent quality products at a very fair price that have been around for 10+ years now (like the X32 mixer) and apart from that, they churn out new products all the time (especially remakes of vintage synthesisers) to keep their users coming back and check out what's new.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
This sounds a lot like Warren Buffett's opinion of stocks. The Berkshire Hathaway Class A stocks are 780k each because he wanted people to act like investors, not speculators.
> Can can git rich by growing slowly in many cases - but it will be a long hard road.
Most people don't have the patience for it and it's not as flashy. Morgan Housel (author of The Psychology of Money) on what a lot of people don't get about Warren Buffett:
> He's 90 years old. But if you look at the course of his life 99% of his net worth came after his 50th birthday and something like 97% came after his 65th birthday. That's just how compounding Works compounding is not something where the big Returns come in a year or in a decade. It's something that takes place over the course of a lifetime and it's important for someone like Warren Buffett to say look, he's 90 years old. He's been investing full-time since he's been 10 years old. So he's been investing for 80 years now. It's really important. Is that the Math on this is very simple. You can hypothetically say, okay if Warren Buffett did not start investing when he was 10. Let's say hypothetically he started investing when he was 25 like a normal person and let's say hypothetically he did not keep investing through age 90 like he has let's say hypothetically he retired at age 65 like a normal person and he would say he was just as successful and investor during that period that he was investing and he earned the same average annual Returns. What would his net worth be today? If you started investing at 25 and retired at 65 the answer is about Million dollars not 90 billion 12 million. So we know that 99.9% of his net worth can be tied to just the amount of time. He has been investing for that's how compounding works it is. So incredibly powerful, but it is rarely intuitive. Even if you understand the math behind compounding it's almost never to it intuitive how powerful it can be.
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?
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.
> 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.
The alternative here is to hire and train people to spend time in the office, rather than selling the company to someone who will do so. That has its own potential problems, for sure, but getting your soul eaten by VC is not one of them.
I'm hard-pressed to believe that there is any situation where VC money is the best answer. It may be the best answer for the person taking the VC cashout, but not the best answer for our world as a whole.
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.
Thank you, that makes so much sense to me. Spotify has, for quite a long time, seemed like a product for people who want to hear music, but don't really like music.
It hadn't occurred to me that that might actually be exactly what's happening.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I think this is just taking the common-on-HN refrain of "boostrap good, VC bad" and trying to apply it to everything. I don't particularly agree with the refrain in the first place, and definitely don't think it applies so broadly.
There are many reasons for products getting worse; sometimes it's because the company making it is trying to appeal to a broader base, so the original enthusiasts are no longer the target. Sometimes it's because different people are involved and they can't produce to the same level. Sometimes things don't really deteriorate, but new innovations make other things more appealing.
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.
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
This is far too generous a story. While true in certain basic respects, it is a process of capitalists changing products to favor their own interests over users in a mature market. It is a process that begins with the promise of individual empowerment (in a new and growing market where companies are forced to appeal to customers) that ends in a kind of silken chains (when the market is well understood and companies are optimizing their financials).
Notably, this process usually involves not creating a simplified interface that can be turned into expert mode but actively removing features, adding cues, and steering user behavior though a psychological maze to achieve desired effects.
Basically, people should understand this corporate lifecycle and stop being deluded by the opening moves in a new market that superficially appear to favor customers, individual empowerment, etc. It is a process that always ends in heartbreak because it serves investors, not the public.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not just that they're expensive markers of conspicuous consumption, it's about exclusivity. Exotic car manufacturers like Ferrari intentionally make fewer cars than the market demands. Only "special" customers are even allowed to buy them regardless of price. Ownership, especially of the higher end models, marks a consumer as a member of a high-status exclusive club. (I am not claiming that this is rational or sensible, but it is an effective marketing strategy for luxury goods.)
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.
> Would someone really describe the LFA as "utterly soulless"?
When it came out the LFA was widely lampooned by the car media for being too "soft", not fast enough, and generally lacking spirit and individuality. It's not pretty much recognized in hindsight that it's one of the single greatest cars ever made, and everybody who regularly buys/drives supercars regrets not buying one when they were still being produced.
Weirdly, many people realized this when it was new, that the LFA was actually excellent, but like anything else cars go through different hype cycles where media organizations and insiders focus on different parameters for what they think makes something good, and the LFA came out during a hype cycle that was focused on raw speed, as it was released around the time that "hypercars" were gaining steam as a concept.
Personally, having driven an LFA one time, I quite literally have regular dreams about the memory, and I wish that I owned one. It's on my bucket list.
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.
Honest question: are you not a "car guy/girl"? Lexus people absolutely love Lexuses. I recently sold mine (needed something larger after having another kid) and I miss it every day.
Well, some people. My friend with a Lexus just has a base model RX 350 because she couldn’t find a RAV4 in stock and her buying criteria were basically “crossover built by Toyota”.
I am ~98th percentile car guy. I own two classic Mustangs, one stock, one restomodded by me, and have had a variety of interesting daily drivers over the decades, including dailying an 80s Alfa Spider year-round including 4 winters in Boston.
It’s comfortable, safe, and dead-nuts reliable, but no one gives a shit about or even notices my hybrid RX450h.
It always surprises me how quickly people forget nuance.
OK so we're discussing niche vs mainstream, or "what most people want" vs "what a few want".
The few cars you listed are not popular in the ownership sense, but they are well-known and aspirational.
People can buy them to show off status / money / exclusivity, or perhaps beauty. Speed is table stakes, of course. They have to objectively be better than most cars but also special. They can be strikingly beautiful or strikingly hideous but they must not be ordinary.
If you watch / read reviews of those cars, then it tends to be from the enthusiast driver point of view. Is it good at racing, cornering, reading the driver's intentions and reacting instantly and accurately? But then more often than not, those that can afford them do not buy them to use them for that purpose (or at least not frequently.) Many are treated a bit like investments or merely items in a collection.
What a long-winded way to get back to the original point of faster horses and enshittification of software, eh?
Netflix and Spotify might as well be a Toyota Corolla or Prius. I lost my train of thought. I think I just wanted to pontificate about exotic cars for a while.
(I drive a Polestar 2. It looks like a Volvo, is heavy as a dump truck, but damn is it fast as hell.)
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.
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.
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.
> 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 FRS/BRZ/GR86 are identical cars mechanically, Toyota owns Scion, so the FRS was replaced by the GT86 and later GR86 within the Toyota line-up when Toyota killed off the Scion brand in the US, and the FRS never existed outside the North American market, because Scion was a North American exclusive brand.
The BRZ/GR86 has a Subaru Boxer engine, with Toyota D4S Port+Direct Injection, using a Toyota ECU/ECM, Toyota/Aisin transmission, Toyota TCU/TCM, and Toyota infotainment (in some generations), but with a mostly Subaru designed chassis and nearly entirely Subaru suspension and post-transmission driveline, but the wheels and tires off a Prius (in the first generation), and a handful of things that were only created to be jointly used by the BRZ/GR86. Except no matter which part you pick on the car, it'll be marked "Subaru", including ironically the Toyota badge on the front of the GT86.
It's better to think of them as what they are, which is different branding for the same vehicle, that was jointly developed and manufactured.
Right, they still exist, but now they’re budget sports cars, which isn’t really what I was talking about. A GR86 is cheaper than most SUVs. A miata is even cheaper. The civic type r is neat, but that’s not a sports car. That’s a performance model of a family car.
The comment I was replying to said that people buy porsches because they’re beautiful.
That’s not it, because the NSX is beautiful, the LFA is beautiful, the FD is beautiful, but nobody wants to spend 200K on a Toyota.
Cars are a signifier, and the viewer needs to understand that sign. Luxury car makers bank on that. Put an LFA and a Cayman next to each other and 9/10 people would think the Cayman is worth more.
The original commenters idea works for content, because content is not a signifier of money. Rich people can’t have more expensive media taste than you, so the enthusiasts set the pace.
But they can have a more expensive car, so no matter how awful a car a lamborghini is, nobody envies the Integra type R next to it.
Back in the 90s a Japanese sports car actually offered a noticeable performance advantage relative to regular passenger cars. The regular passenger cars generally had weak engines, terrible suspensions, slow shifting automatic transmissions, and little in the way of driver assistance features. Now any generic modern crossover SUV can be driven well beyond the legal speed limit on any public road without really approaching the vehicle's limits, so except for hard core enthusiasts who intend on tracking their cars there's just not much advantage to buying a sports car any more.
The Plaza Accord was 1985. And it wasn’t just between the US and Japan. iIf included France, Germany and the UK.
The Japanese economy continued to grow until the mid 1990s. I think the real culprit was low birth rate in the prior 20 years did not train the next generation of productive workers. China, South Korea most of Europe face similar issues
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.
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 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.
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.
>Chrome ate everyone's lunch because everyone was using google to search for stuff, and they could advertise their browser on their home page or together with their search results.
That and it was such a better browsing experience. Firefox was not good compared to Chrome for years. I'm sure they are feature parity now, but for years the Chrome experience was significantly better.
> That and it was such a better browsing experience. Firefox was not good compared to Chrome for years. I'm sure they are feature parity now, but for years the Chrome experience was significantly better.
As someone who lived through those days, that is just straight up not true. The only measurable advantage that Chrome had over Firefox was in Javascript performance, because V8 was superior to the JS engine built into Gecko before the SpiderMonkey project started.
Chrome won off mindshare, not off technical superiority. Everyone /assumes/ technical superiority because it's Google, but that's just not accurate. At best, you could count in Chrome's favor their early support for "web standards", because most of those standards were invented at Google, stuck into Chrome, and then only afterwards standardized so that others could make use of them. While the Chrome team at Google has done good work and an immense amount of work, they didn't start from nothing, Blink is a derivative of WebKit and didn't even diverge with the fork until 2013. Webkit itself didn't exist until 2001, when it was forked by Apple from KHTML (developed by the KDE team as a community project).
The story of Chrome is the story of "embrace, extend, extinguish" from the Microsoft playbook, done by an even more powerful and influential technology giant being played out. It is not the story of technological superiority, nor was there any strong technical reason why Google couldn't have contributed their work into the open without creating their own browser. Even with Chrome, other than the development of V8, they contributed all of their work back to WebKit until 2013 when they forked.
No surprise that Google regularly makes changes in its applications which advantage Chrome, penalize competing browsers, and still advertise Chrome on the front page of google.com, the most valuable ad real estate that exists anywhere.
As someone else who lived through those days, I have to disagree.
First, JavaScript performance was not an afterthought, it was a big deal.
Second, Chrome's sandbox was massively superior from a security point of view. In a world full of viruses, that was a big deal.
I personally recommended Chrome to family and friends. I did so because I didn't want to be tech support for their virus problems. But what I sold them on was the speed.
> First, JavaScript performance was not an afterthought, it was a big deal.
It's a /very/ big deal. It's not a mistake that V8 was chosen to build Node.JS on top of. Javascript performance continues to dominate the overall performance of browsers on the modern web as front-end developers utilize more and more JS weight in their pages and SPAs become even more commonplace.
Don't mistake my comment as saying that the win for Javascript performance wasn't a big win. V8 completely upended the expectations of both web developers and engine teams about what was not only expected but was what feasible when it came to JS performance. V8 is great, but it didn't need a new browser to ship it, which was my larger point.
> Second, Chrome's sandbox was massively superior from a security point of view. In a world full of viruses, that was a big deal.
Chrome's sandbox is not particularly better than Firefox's sandbox today. Both browsers invented new security concepts over the last decade+ as browsers have become larger, more integral to people's day to day workflows, and more security-sensitive. A modern browser in 2025 is easily as complex as a modern OS in 2025 with similar security implications.
When Chrome first came out, it had one major improvement over Firefox (and both were better than any alternatives for security) which was to run tab contexts in separate processes rather than separate threads. This opened up all sorts of opportunities and benefits, which Chrome capitalized on, proving this approach to be correct, and later Mozilla adopted it in Firefox as well. From a security perspective, the main benefit was to prevent different sites from sharing process memory context, in the event that the site was malicious and exploiting a browser bug to access process memory.
The modern Chrome sandbox (and Firefox sandbox) is magnitudes more advanced and complex than the sandboxing that Chrome initially shipped with, and at least to my recollection there was not a significant difference in security surface area between the two other than tab isolation at Chrome launch, which I don't really count as a "sandbox".
On performance, you're acknowledging my point without recognizing how important it was for switching back in 2008. Using the web, particularly JavaScript heavy parts of the web like Google's business suite, Chrome was a significantly better experience than Firefox. It was a real reason to switch. (I'll return to V8 shortly.)
On the sandbox, I think that you are confusing the Chrome Sandbox (released in 2008) with the Privacy Sandbox (released in 2019). At the release of Chrome, it was a significant security improvement over existing browsers. You might not call their process isolation a sandbox, but they certainly did. See https://blog.chromium.org/2008/10/new-approach-to-browser-se... to verify.
True, security and sandboxing have improved greatly in the decades since. But the current quality of Firefox is irrelevant to people's reasons to switch back then.
Now let's go back to why Chrome was developed. As articles like https://www.computerworld.com/article/1501244/the-real-reaso... demonstrate, Google's reasoning was widely understood at the time. Google wanted complex web applications to run better. And Google also wanted people to not fear for the security of their web applications. So they focused on performance and security.
What Google didn't care about was creating a monopoly. Sure, they could have released V8 without a browser attached. But that wouldn't have changed the consumer experience in the way that Google cared about. That said, they had every reason to pull V8 out of Chrome and release it independently. They were as surprised as anyone when someone chose to create node.js out of it. Their actual goal was to hope that other browsers would use a better JS engine after one was shown to them. Or, if they failed to use it directly, they'd study it and copy its good tricks.
Now you claim that the fact that V8 could have been shipped on its own was part of some larger point. I have absolutely no idea what larger point that might be. But there was a significant period of time where Chrome had V8 and everything else was comparatively slow. Which speaks directly to my point that consumers had very good technical reasons to switch to Chrome.
This is completely wrong. Chrome won initially because it was a much better browser in terms of user experience. I remember the original discussions around it, they innovated a bunch of features like processes-per-tab so if one tab crashed you wouldn't have to restart the whole browser.
It also had a much cleaner UI - that's why it was called "Chrome" in the first place, because it only had the chrome. You can see that these were true innovations because everyone else copied them.
>As someone who lived through those days, that is just straight up not true.
As someone else who lived through those days, you're either misremembering or lying to yourself. As an end user, chrome was just better by any metric end users cared about. The fact that you're mentioning a bunch of stuff unrelated to things that end users care about leads me to believe that you aren't able to think objectively about that.
Please name a metric or set of metrics? Because when we talk about metrics, these are measurable data points. Chrome has better Javascript performance, this is a measurable datapoint, and they definitely did technically win here. That was essentially the only metric that they won on.
If the metric is mindshare, end user engagement, or anything "feely", of course they were ahead... that's the end result of Marketing. That's what Marketing does. They had front-and-center advertising on the most visited website in the world, with branding from the (at the time) most valuable tech company in the world.
FWIW, these are moving targets, browser teams across the board are constantly working on engine-side performance to make up for the complete lack of care from front-end developers as the JS community continues to churn through hype cycles, so that we aren't destroying batteries on dominant web devices (mobile phones and laptops). Mozilla has been maintaining public repeatable benchmarks for a very long time and continues to do so, although there isn't enough data available to go back in time ~10 years: https://arewefastyet.com/
It was such a better end user experience, I can't believe you're arguing otherwise. I appreciate what Mozilla does, but their history includes multiple periods of being a worse browsing experience than their competitors. You don't need marketing to tell you that it's a better experience when you could run them side by side and notice that one would crash far more often than the other, and one would struggle with lots of tabs and the other wouldn't, one would render pages faster and more accurately than the other.
Again, you obviously aren't able to objectively talk about end user experience for some reason and need to be honest with yourself about that. You should load up a VM with XP or Vista and Firefox 3.0 and refamiliarize yourself with the time period you claim to have lived through.
I'm arguing because I have used /both/ Chrome and Firefox in parallel since the initial release of both pieces of software, including regularly benchmarking them. In the sum totality of the data I have seen, there have been many moments of back and forth where one was "better" than the other, but in the end they are roughly equivalent. When Chrome /first/ released, it had a huge performance advantage explicitly due to V8 and how heavy JS usage was on the web (which has only gotten heavier over time). After that advantage was mostly nullified by the rewrite of the JS engine in Firefox, the performance differential was around a maximum of 5-10% at any given time in one direction or another as both teams worked on improving performance.
> You don't need marketing to tell you that it's a better experience when you could run them side by side and notice that one would crash far more often than the other, and one would struggle with lots of tabs and the other wouldn't, one would render pages faster and more accurately than the other.
As mentioned, I have run them side by side daily for a decade+, including for many long stretches of times both the stable and nightly builds of both. I /still/ to this day, use both browsers every single day. I have not seen anything which would make me believe that one is more stable than the other, or that absent the performance gains on heavy JS sites (early SPAs), that one had a particular advantage in tab-count/memory footprint compared to the other.
Almost all the performance differences were deeply tied to the JS engine, and actually still are (but now wasm too).
> Again, you obviously aren't able to objectively talk about end user experience for some reason and need to be honest with yourself about that. You should load up a VM with XP or Vista and Firefox 3.0 and refamiliarize yourself with the time period you claim to have lived through.
I might do that over the weekend for kicks and grins. I assure you, I am being honest and fairly objective.
It's funny how everyone is so certain I'm wrong, but provided no evidence, other than to point out things that are based /exactly/ on the one major technical win I acknowledged in my original comment and have completely ignored the very public benchmarking efforts that have gone on the entire lifecycle of Chrome.
I don't think you're wrong, but I think you may have misread the original post, which pointed out that Chrome was better than Firefox for years. You agree that Chrome had a huge performance advantage in 2008 and that this advantage persisted until Firefox released either JaegerMonkey, in 2011, or IonMonkey, in 2013; it's not clear which you're writing about. You also agree that Chrome had a stability and security advantage due to isolating each tab in its own process, which Firefox also didn't get for years.
You're replying to a post which claimed that Chrome was better than Firefox for years, with a rebuttal that claims Chrome was better than Firefox for years, but then Firefox improved. That doesn't change anything! Those early years from 2008 onward were critical for early adoption and gave Chrome inertia which it was able to ride to market dominance. I don't think any of your posts, while correct, have addressed that initial argument.
It was much faster than Firefox, that's why I switched. It could handle more tabs. It isolated tabs so if one crashed it didn't crash the whole browser. Memory usage was lower. I wouldn't call any of those "marketing" and "mindshare".
> It was much faster than Firefox, that's why I switched.
This was pretty much entirely because of the JS performance advantage from V8 near the beginning.
> It could handle more tabs.
This was pretty much entirely because of the JS performance advantage from V8 near the beginning.
> It isolated tabs so if one crashed it didn't crash the whole browser.
This is definitely a win for Chrome and something we eventually saw Firefox adopt, but many many years later.
> Memory usage was lower.
This was a combination of factors, but heavily related to the improved JS performance due to V8. A big piece was also that XUL was a pig.
Thanks for pointing out some specific things, but while they affect specific perceptions, underneath the covers most of this had to do with the combination of improved JS performance in Chrome + a heavy reliance on JS for web.
The point is that "the Chrome experience was significantly better" was obviously true for a great many users. It doesn't matter what exact optimizations it boils down to.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
I have something worse. One morally questionable video popped in my Instagram that showed some disabled person doing something outrageously stupid capitalising on their disability for engagement.
I didn't like it, I didn't share it, I didn't do any other thing than just stare at it in shock.
Big mistake.
For over 6 months that became +50% of my feed. Incredible and depressing amount of people monetising the disability of their friends, siblings, children, or their own. Really effed up content that makes you stop and say wtf out loud. But they also earn a living. But they should do it in a honorable manner. But maybe they don't have the chance. So I flag as not interested but that just swaps those videos with new BRAND NEW "content creators" of this kind that I hadn't yet seen. Wow thanks Instagram.
At some point they changed something in the algorithm and now those videos rarely pop anymore, and I'm wary and scroll away fast.
>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.
None of the music services seem to understand that just because you like multiple genres, that doesn't mean that you want it to randomly jump around between them without any consideration for how they flow together.
That's something I'd actually pay good money for - a streaming music service with a library as extensive as the major contenders (or better yet let me bring my own!), which learns my preferences not in isolation, but tracking how they affect each other and environment - this song is normally followed by that song, or this song usually gets skipped if playing while driving etc.
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.
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.
My friend does some trades in watch market as he gets access to limited editions from time to time (if you know right people in dealerships you can sometimes buy a watch out of line if the original "subscribed" buyer doesn't show up).
There are quite a few people who want to buy an expensive watch or two to show off on their social media. People just really like shiny status symbols.
Shady business, potentially, but you might be underestimating how much some guys really, really need to have the most expensive watch in their friend group.
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)
Watches, are just jewelry for most people any more. There are few people that can't check their phone for whatever reason that need functional watches, the rest of society mostly uses them for fashion.
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
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.)
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
I think that's a self-dellusion many tech enthusiasts have, that they're somehow trend-setters.
And then the same enthusiasts say for the original iPod "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame", and see the masses jump to buy it, and themselves only catch up later.
Or they see the masses never caring for their e.g. desktop Linux, whose mass dominance (not mere "works for me" or "have set it up for my elderly parents and they don't even know it's not Windows") would come "any day now" for the last 30 years...
Trend-setters exist, but they're a different group than the "tiny minority" of enthusiasts. More like some musician paid to spot Beats headphones, or some cool dude sporting some gadget early on.
>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.
A hell of a lot of people had a real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH, if they could have the chance. And even more admired Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches because of their design and elegance (and price, people aspire to luxury goods, even when they can't afford them), not because some sport-car afficionados said so.
It's the same in other areas: the popular books, or comics, or movies, or music, etc. are rarely if ever what the "inner" crowd of each niche admires. Most people buy Reacher and such, not Finnegan's Wake.
>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.
More likely, if you want to keep and continue increasing your margins, and your stock price, you'll incrementally continue to shit all over your product trying to squeeze ever more money.
Neither the "enthusiasts"/tech-savvy users NOR the "median user" wants Netflix to be the shit it has become, or Google search to be so fucked up, or ads and nags on Windows UI, and so on.
They're just given those, and they accept them having no recourse. The moment there's a better recourse, they jump to it (like IE -> Firefox -> Chrome, or BS early search engines -> Altavista -> Google).
I think the second paragraph in the parent comment fits really well with mimetic theory and this René Girard quote: "Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires." This, however, doesn't mean that the current Netflix solution is the only one possible.
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.
(Not OP) I can think of many ways where optimizing for greater watch time is unaligned and often opposite to making me happy and giving me what I want.
In the case of Netflix, what I want might be to watch one show at a time for one or two hours every night. It may even for some people be about watching The Office or Friends, a show they know well and just watch for comfort.
What Netflix wants is for me to start a completely new show (and probably one they produced themselves) every single time I open Netflix, and also to binge watch for six hours every night because I have “so many shows to keep up with.” This may not make me happy. But they suppose maybe it’ll make me more likely to keep my subscription.
> 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.
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 .
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!
>maybe that really is the most profitable way to run a tech business.
That's the issue, it seems like it really is the most profitable way to do things. Everything sucks now because shooting brainrot and advertisements at our eyes and ears is more profitable than actually giving us what we want.
yeah except a lot of those companies almost went bankrupt trying to make those cars for enthusiasts and only for them.
porsche and lambo didn't see the outsized success they have now (financially) until they started pumping out SUVs. hell, the purosangue was made precisely to capitalize on that boring market segment.
i feel there's a little suvivorship bias at play here. i think the important thing is to not forget your enthusiasts perhaps, but a lot of these "successes" wouldn't even be around were it not for appealing to the greater masses. ofc some market segments fare better and you can build a business around enthusiasts.
> very few people have any real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH
I agree with that.
> but Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as desirable cars
I agree with that too.
> because the people who are into cars like those marques.
I think that is not true. I don’t care about cars. Never had one. Don’t even have a driving licence.
The reason why i think Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are desirable cars is because they look cool, and they sound cool. They were designed to be like that. If i see one on the street i notice it. I couldn’t care less about the opinion of gearheads. If a car would come out looking like my grandpa’s skoda, but all the car lovers would love it I wouldn’t even hear about it.
It is all about flashyness of the industrial design. And rarity of course.
By that logic if you start making rare cool looking sportcars they would be automatically desirable. I doubt that would happen. Unless gearheads give it "approval", no one would buy it and you will be out of business.
> Unless gearheads give it "approval", no one would buy it and you will be out of business.
There is a slight sifting of goalpost here. I was talking about being "understood as desirable cars". You are now talking about business success. They are not the same. Think of DeLorean. They are absolutely understood as desirable cars, and they very much went bankrupt.
> By that logic if you start making rare cool looking sportcars they would be automatically desirable.
Yep. I don't see anything problematic with that. I believe if you make a rare and cool looking sportcar people will recognise it as desirable. That's basically the definiton of "cool looking". If people (gearheads and regular folks alike) don't recognise it as desirable then you didn't made a cool looking car.
Which part do you disagree with here? I'm just thinking how we could test it. Imagine a car hot-or-not site. One where users have to "pick" which car is looking better or more desirable. The ultimate test would be to mix a few fictional sport car looking cars there. One which is completely made up so the gearheads could not have possibly approved it already. Do you think people would rate these fictional cars less desirable just because they doesn't exist? If you think this is suitable to answer our disagreement we could set this experiment up.
> I was talking about being "understood as desirable cars". You are now talking about business success. They are not the same.
I mean to be widely desirable car requires some business success first.
> Do you think people would rate these fictional cars less desirable just because they doesn't exist?
Yes. You must be a rare carhead to judge the whole thing from just the outside and engine sound. The rest of normal people know they cannot and use reputation as proxy. I don't think it needs proving..,
This is exactly the situation unfolding with JetBrains right now. They've lost all touch with their professional enthusiast core and have gone hell-bent on acquiring new users at the cost of alienating a big chunk of their core. I don't think it's going to go well for them, they don't have the chops to compete with Microsoft like they're presently trying to do.
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).
It's probably profitable in a lot of cases to follow those metrics, shovelware content is cheaper to produce, and since the median user pays the same subscription fee as the enthusiast, you get better margins producing slop for the uncaring masses.
You need enthusiast businesses owners to produce quality product.
Damn, I never thought of this before, but it explains so much!
You’re talking both about tastemakers and the silent majority vs loud minority.
I promise it is NOT always a good idea to follow the enthusiasts, because they are not at all like everyone else who uses your thing. Following them will skew your decisions—unless they are your entire customer base, so, have at it.
This article imo is complaining about the effect of middle management product owners at large companies. There are two dynamics that both converge on enshittification:
1. These product managers (or product designers) are early in their careers and want to make a splash. They are given lower priority projects but try to break out by making them bigger, better, more non-horse-like. They over-design and over-complicate the solutions as a result, because they don’t yet know when the right solution is just a refinement of what’s tried and true. They are incentivized to do this because they want to break out of the mold.
2. The managers above them, or a layer or two above depending on company size, are risk AVERSE. They are tasked with delivering results regularly and consistently. If you have the innovation bug or are creative at this layer, you get moved onto projects where this is required, which is not most of them. Overcomplicated is fine sometimes with you but WEIRD is absolutely not okay (the stuff that actually could be innovative), and no one gets fired for following The Metrics.
These two incentives clash to create overcomplicated but functionally poor products that aren’t helping anybody out. A healthy skepticism of complication and a healthy skepticism of engagement as the sole metric (or metrics in general) is necessary to make good shit. Sometimes it is actually understanding and using things as an enthusiast would, but you need to bring in an understanding of how the rest of your users are distinctly different from the enthusiasts, too. Using your thing yourself and actually following your own subtler feelings is what produces really useful innovation, slowly and surely over time.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
>> search is very important - to the point where effective search was one of the main focuses of the company's development.
THIS is what I really do not get.
Of course N=[small_numbers_somewhat_selective], but I have never encountered anyone who wanted anything other than good search. I have only ever heard complaints about the messy Amazon-style searches. In decades I have NEVER heard or seen a written comment about someone finding something great that 'just popped up' in an otherwise failed search. No one likes sloppy search or finds it anything but a waste of time and actually drives them away from the site.
Yet, clearly the search-enshittifiers have some data or usage pattern information indicating it works for them, or they wouldn't keep doing it. Does anyone know what this data might be?
I also don't know why they couldn't do both. Present the sloppy-search but have a small button to switch over to strict search (or even better, a McMaster-style search). I fail to see how that wouldn't be better, since I and everyone I know now actively work avoid Amazon and the like rather than work to try to find stuff in their shitty search. I came originally because it was easy to find stuff. Now, it is hard so I'm elsewhere
I suspect, this is just my personal opinion, doesn’t reflect any of my former or current employers opinions, the Amazon makes a lot of money based on ad revenue. I don’t think there’s a lot of evidence that they’re killing it on the online retail front.
there have been many e-commerce players that have come in to the gap there and specialize in these “niche” products or services that deliver fast as Amazon and it isn’t hard to do so if you’re willing to invest. i would not personally be surprised if amazon saw long term growth loss in their e-commerce sector, especially given the competetion from other retailers that have adjusted - like walmart and target.
That would make sense as to why they insist on making search worse — keep you in the doom loop to show more promoted products and collect more pennies from the promotion, even if you end up going and purchasing somewhere else. Same Prime subscriptions, as long as they keep you coming back just enough to keep re-subscribing, they collect $130 or whatever per year.
I had noticed a while ago I was using Amazon in a way analogous to 'showrooming'. When Amazon came on the scene, people would look in the brick&mortar stores to see what goods they liked, then buy cheaper on Amazon. I had now unconsciously started using Amazon to do a broad survey search before purchasing somewhere else. OFC, when their search tool really enshittified, haven't been there much.
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.
> 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.
This is so spot on. I was a long-time serial entrepreneur who spent a couple decades across three successful startups discovering, shipping and growing new categories of tech products primarily for consumer, prosumer and hobbyists. Then I sold my last startup to a very large F500 silicon valley tech leader and ended up a senior product exec there. While there were a lot of positives like more mature engineering processes, testing and devops as a discipline, the exact issue you describe was a nightmare of product-damaging mistakes I called "analytics abuse." In my startups I valued having increasingly robust analytics over the years. In part because they helped increase my overall understanding of usage but mostly because they provoked good questions to explore. That exploration happened naturally because as the "product guy / founder" I never stopped spending a lot of time with our most passionate, opinionated, thought-leading customers. Over years of iteration I'd learned how to engage deeply and listen carefully to input from these customers. This involved interpreting, filtering and curating the mess of divergent personal preferences and pet feature ideas to tease out the more actionable product signals that could increase broad usage, adoption and passion around our products. I'd then bring those curated signals back to the product teams for evaluation and prioritization.
At BigCo they were diligent about meeting with customers, in fact they had entire processes around it, but their rigorous structures and meeting agendas often got in the way of just directly engaging and actively listening. Worse, the customer meetings the more senior product decision makers actually attended in person were mostly with the highest revenue customers. Junior PMs (and sometimes new grads) were delegated to meeting with the broader base of customers and filing reports. Those reports were then aggregated by ever-helpful program managers into tables of data and, eventually, slides - losing all nuance and any ability to spot an emerging outlier signal and tug on that thread to see where it goes.
I tried to convince everyone that we were missing important customer signals, especially from our smartest, most committed users. Being only one level removed from the CEO and quite credible based on prior success, I was definitely heard and most people agreed there was something being lost but no one could suggest a way to modify what we were doing that could scale across dozens of major products and hundreds of product managers, designers, execs and other stakeholders. In my experience, this general problem is why large companies, even the most well-run, successful ones full of smart people trying their best, end up gradually nerfing the deeper appeal in their own products. Frustratingly, almost every small, single step in that long slide pushes some short-term metric upward but the cumulative effect is the product loses another tiny piece of the soul that made our most evangelistic, thought-leading customers love the product and promote it widely. Ultimately, I ended up constantly arguing we should forego the uplift from some small, easy-to-prove, metric-chasing change to preserve some cumulative whole most people in the org weren't fully convinced even existed. It was exhausting. And there's no fighting the tide of people incentivized on narrow KPIs come bonus season.
I'm sorry to report I never found a solution to this problem, despite my best efforts over several years. I think it's just fundamental. Eventually I just told friends, "It's a genetic problem that's, sadly, endemic to the breed" (the 'breed' being well-run, very large tech companies with the smartest product people HR can hire at sufficient scale). Even if I was anointed CEO, given the size of the product matrix, I could only have personally driven a handful of products. I do think codifying premises and principles from the CEO level can help but it still gets diluted as the number of products, people and processes scales.
Given several mrandish-equivalents, gathered into a side-channel Customer Advocacy org, is there some way to integrate their output without this problematic constantly arguing against metric-chasing?
I'm groping towards something vaguely ombudsman-y, or WW2 production/logistics trouble shooters. Or maybe even pre-Bush41 ARPA Project Managers - term-limited person-with-a-checkbook and few accountability constraints.
If one accepts this role has to be out-of-band, vs poking big hairy blob in hope of creating and maintaining signal channels with particular properties, and grants CEO-adjacent leverage, then it seems a remaining unresolved challenge is integrating the output signals at scale? If so, maybe (jest) CA granted KPI offsets?
As I said, it's an extremely difficult problem. To be honest, I doubt it's really solvable in a scalable way across an entire org. The best you can probably do is a combination of implementing a few top down directives and, on the other end, fire fighting flare-ups around specific hot points. But I also hope (desperately) that I'm wrong and that you'll build that shining Camelot on the hill in your org.
Top Down
* Start with clear CEO buy-in supporting a clear manifesto. Include some case study-ish examples of how short-term metric-chasing can go wrong. Do education sessions around this across the product and design orgs. Socialize the concept of "Enshittification." Get people sharing their own examples, whether how Google Search used to be good or how they used to be able to find stuff on Amazon but now the fucking search doesn't even work with quotes or exclusion like it used to. Actually show how you can't find a specifically narrow type of product by excluding features. Ask "How did smart, good people slowly slide down a slippery slope to a pretty evil place?" Discuss how your org can avoid the same fate (or if it even should). Goal: Create awareness. Win (some) hearts and minds.
* Radical idea: seize control of all granular analytics data. Yes, I'm suggesting that product teams cannot directly access their own raw analytics data anymore until it's been corrected for short-term bias and to re-weight by user type. Nor can they unilaterally add new analytics to their product until your CA org has vetted that even gathering that new data won't inappropriately bias internal perception. Before distribution to product teams, granular usage data is first recast and contextualized into new user-type and time horizon buckets that make it hard to chase (or even see) lowest-common denominator "bad" product changes.
I think this is hugely important. I saw certain savvy PMs cleverly manipulate how analytics were tallied and also suggest new measures in a veiled effort to boost short-term incremental metric gains, almost always in the quarter before bonus season. I also saw designers who were heavily bought into the "less density, less choices" zen ethos I called "The Church of Saint Johnny Ive" (which seems to pathologically despise advanced and power users), actively weaponize analytics to generate data supporting their religiously-held worldview and force killing significant functionality beloved by smaller advanced user segments. If those designers ran Burger King the slogan would have to change to "Have it MY way (because I graduated from Stanford D-School and know what you should want)". If you don't seize control of the raw usage data so it can't be weaponized for KPIs (or religious agendas), you'll never be able to make serious traction. Also, doing this will trigger World War III and you'll find out right away if senior leadership is really committed to supporting you. :-)
* Create new segmentation categories of user types. For example, use in-product behavior to identify power users who are passionate and engaged (discount daily frequency and session time / amplify usage depth of specific advanced features), Identify long-time users who were early adopters and dramatically amplify their analytics signal. Every click they make should be worth hundreds of drive-by, newbie users who barely understand the entire product yet.
* Create KPI demerits for teams who make changes that annoy or dismay long-term users as measured by posts on user forums, social media and in deep interviews of unhappy or exiting customers. A handful of such posts should be able to wipe out the gains of a hundred incremental pixel-moving tweaks. Causing strong negative feedback from thoughtful users who care should be feared like touching the third-rail.
* On that topic, once you have control of the granular usage data, simply aggregate all small increases or decreases into one big bucket that's only released into the overall number on a time-delay, maybe even once a year right after KPI/bonus season. Make it so no one thinks they can get "get there" by optimizing 0.1% at a time. All the tweaking of shades of color or moving shit 4 pixels is a distraction at best and at worst ends up losing the beating heart that engages users who really give a shit about the overall experience.
* Assign a tangible economic cost to teams removing a long-time feature. Of course they always have analytics which say "not enough users use it." Institutionalize an organizational default position that's extremely skeptical of removing or moving (aka burying) stuff that's been there since the product's "boost" growth that made it what it is. That shit's grandfathered in and is "don't touch" unless they've got an overwhelming case and a senior product owner ready to make a career-betting stand over it.
* Overall, adjust the KPI/metrics economy through targeted inflation and devaluation of the currency to focus on longer-term objectives.
Bottom Up
* I like your KPI offsets idea.
* Also create a way of rewarding doing more of the right stuff. Special awards not based on specific metrics but on overall "getting it" and making sincere creative efforts to try stuff that's not likely to pay-off near-term.
* Feature user feedback forums more so they get more use. Spiff teams that get more feedback as measured both by quantity and degree of depth. Add specific categories like "Hey, Put That Back!" to encourage that sort of feedback. Don't just count posts and up votes. Inflate the weight of long, passionate or angry posts and posts that elicit more written replies in addition to up votes. Apply appropriate discounts to frequent feedbackers and amplify feedback from people who signed up just to bitch about this one thing. Teams should fear making changes that cause long-time users who rarely post feedback to post emotional rants.
* Find those individuals in the product, design and engineering orgs who believe in valuing the depth of long-term user commitment as much as you do. Make common cause with them. Have a secret club and handshake if you have to but support them and elicit their 'outside-channels' feedback. They're your best source of warning when the forces of short-term darkness are coming in the night with pitchforks (and they will).
Then, how could a business identify its (or market's) trend-setters, enthusiasts, or whatever we call them, which will push towards something new? I see this as essential for either making the business better, shinier, or to avoid losing users.
By participating in the community. Content moderation on HN is so much better than on Facebook because dang is one of us, whereas on Facebook, it's a team of people in a developing country, in a different cultural context. Netflix needs to be run by film enthusiasts, not UX engineers trying to disguise the fact that all the good IP has been pulled back to the streaming platforms of the original producers. Spotify 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.
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.
Teams should identify their drivers of key metrics and do power user analysis based on this. A halfway decent analytics team should be thinking this way.
Ultimately, analytics are just a view into the business. This thread is complaining about doctors not using microscopes when diagnosing system issues - sometimes a narrow slice is important, sometimes you need to zoom out. If you focus on your "early adopters" or power users exclusively, without understanding how they affect the business, then you are at risk of building things that most of your user base doesn't want.
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.
> 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.
> Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as desirable cars
... primarily for their price tag. There are a lot of enthusiasts for money in the world, much more than for driving at 200 mph.
> the change was driven by enthusiasts recommending the latest and greatest to their less-technically-inclined friends and family
It was never about recommendations. MSIE and Chrome were (and are, but with Edge Browser instead of MSIE) shoved into consumers' throats by ads, marketing, bundled distribution and outrageous lies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Um, yes they do. The left sidebar on the desktop app is titled "Your Library". On the mobile app, it is the third nav icon at the bottom right of the screen.
You can save albums to the library by opening the album page and clicking the circled-plus "Save to Your Library" button. It then appears in your library under "Albums". You can search the library, sort by recently played, recently added, alphabetical, creator. You can also save singles, playlists, podcasts and artists to your library. If you go into settings, you can connect your library to locally stored files.
I could go on. This took me literally 1 minute of opening up Spotify and looking at the UI.
This is from the Spotify support page for the web player (what I was using):
> To add something to Your Library:
> - Click Like on any song, album, or playlist to save to your Liked Songs playlist
> - Click 3 horizontal dots on any song or album to add them to a new or existing playlist
> - Click FOLLOW on any artist, podcast or show
So the “Library” is a proxy for artists I follow, songs in a playlist, or songs I like.
I find that confusing and it’s not really what I want. For example, there are songs I wouldn’t say I like enough to click the heart on them, as I wouldn’t want them inflicting my recommendations, but I might still want them in my library for easy access. Others I might like well enough without loving them.
The alternative would be to make playlists where I just throw stuff for storage, which seems like a messy way to managing things.
Then the followed artists seem like a wrench in the whole system, as it’s a totally different concept.
For mobile it mentions the + to add to Library, without mentioning the 3 bullets for doing it on the desktop/web. Why would mobile have a completely different mechanic for managing the library than the web, when it’s managing the same collection for the user? That also makes 0 sense.
Spotify hides the ability to just have your own stuff in favor of their algorithm they want to shove down your throat. It isn't just library management, but every part of their UI feels more like algo-driven exploration and recommendations as opposed to 'I'm in the drivers seat, and I decide when I want to explore'.
Its so frustrating, and I find it hard to explain to folks who have never had their own music collection finely curated - whether physical, in mp3s carefully renamed and organized (probably to be played thru winamp), or now in something like Roon or Apple music or one of the winamp-like local music apps.
Don't get me wrong, I've discovered great stuff via the various algo-radio things every service offers now and auto-plays if your queue ends. But I find much more great music via friends or music sites or reddit. And I want to be in the drivers seat when choosing music - starting with things I've added or favorited or added to playlists.
Anytime I have to use Spotify (typically to share w/ friends) its clear their product is all about _them_ and the stuff they want to push, and not about me.
It’s not the same because with Apple Music you still have an iPod like library you can go through with artists/albums/songs.
If you like a song on Spotify it just adds it to the massive playlist. It only adds it to its library management thing if you like the Album. If you click an artist in your library it takes you to their main page rather than to your library of saved songs by them.
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.
If you only stream your music then the difference is negligible, but Apple Music blends Spotify-like streaming music with your personal library of music you own. It's built off of iTunes in this regard. One perk of this is that you can upload your own music and it shows up everywhere matched to the real albums and artists; Spotify's support for streaming local files is much clunkier.
On the other hand they are sometimes bad keeping content matched when you add an album to your library and, I assume, the distributor replaces the album with a different version. This also happens with "matched content" when you added a ripped version of music you own.
It’s less obvious than with Netflix because the songs don’t completely disappear. Spotify pays different rates for different songs depending on the label so there are certain songs they’d rather you not listen to and other content it’s much cheaper for them if you listen to so they push you to that content.
> They each had to change species or die, and they chose to keep living.
Did they, though? 2025 Netflix is extremely close to having a worse UX than piracy, and it's already far more expensive. Are people going to pay a fortune for Netflix when their handy nephew can hook them up to his far superior Jellyfin instance for a sixpack of beer?
It's a tragedy of the commons, really. The whole value is in having a complete catalogue available for the casual viewer, and making $10-$20 from someone wanting to watch a random decade-old movie twice a month or so. Break up that catalogue into twenty different services each charging $15, and that same casual viewer isn't going to subscribe to a single one of them.
If the streaming industry doesn't get its shit together they are either going to lose viewers to piracy, or to a completely different medium.
You are overestimating how many people have access to a piracy nephew by a very, very large margin. And even if we all knew a privacy nephew, they're very quickly going to stop responding to incessant requests for more content. And they won't be available 24/7.
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 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.
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.
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
I'm using usenet and a bunch of FOSS (*arr) and I'm never going back. This way I OWN my library, there is no chance that in November I will lose the ability to rewatch the office due to some uninteresting bullshit.
Whenever I physically can I buy DVDs or digital downloads.
I guess I just didn't understand the Netflix model - why would I want to rent something that I can just buy and have for life? Especially with the enshitification these days - it means I have to pay a massive amount of money (over 5 years say), for a shitty experience, ending up having nothing when I cancel the subscription? That's just a recurring bad deal, in my opinion.
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.
This. The absolute worst case scenario for streaming is you open the app scroll for a minute or less then close it. If you scroll for 10 minutes instead of just 1 the streaming service has much larger mindshare and youre more likely to check again tomorrow.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
My problem with turning it of is that if you _do_ want to watch the preview it's very cumbersome. Clicking on it goes to the movie/episode. So to get to the preview you have to go to the list of Episodes, scroll down (and try not to get spoiled) to trailers then play it. So I have one profile with it on and one with it off, depending on if I'm browsing or not.
100%. Wasn’t trying to contradict your statement - just giving some additional context.
And he is a semi popular tech YouTuber that has risen to popularity in the last couple of years. I think he also streams on twitch but I’m not on that site so I can’t say. But he worked for Netflix for about 10 years.
> 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.
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.
Because my netflix subscription is cancelled specifically because the "Finding something I want to watch drains my energy" phenomenon. Gradually over the course of like a year I got more and more frustrated with being suggested things, and not having a good way to find things.
I wish Netflix and other streaming services had more information about a movie or show for me to base my decision on. I would like more text. Maybe, some reviewer snippets. The full major cast members, not just the top names. The director should be prominently displayed. Let me easily see what else that director has done, even if it's not on that streaming channel.
Apple TV is the worst, because it dumps you right into the program, and you have to back out in order to get more information.
They all just want me to trust them that I'll love it. I end up having to pull up reviews on my phone.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
The LinkedIn feed would actually be very useful if it only showed my contact's milestones such as job updates, their own product/service launches and events like conferences or conventions that involve them.
Of course, such a feed would take me 2 minutes per week to read through so that wouldn't be good for the business.
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.
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.
> 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)
i think people's view of netflix's business model is heavliy biased by what they want netflix to be.
i get it, i hate what they've become too. i'd like to believe there's a world where paying for content is a better model than selling ads. but the reality is that every time netflix makes a decision that the internet gets angry about, their balance sheet looks better.
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).
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.
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.
The thing about the situation is, now that when Tik-tok-ification has grown big enough, it (no-choice interfaces, "enshitification", etc) becomes the only paradigm UI designers, managers and investors understand. Moreover, it's interface that essentially completely controls the user - all the choices they have are essentially fake and control always appeals to managers and control may not immediately make money but it can make money long term so it can be justified.
You can see how Sonos enshitified their interface and even with a user rebellion wouldn't back down, just as an example.
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.
The implication here is appeal to a wider audience _at the expense_ of the existing customer base, right? Otherwise it wouldn't be a tyranny at all.
What I don't get is at some point the marginal user increase for a change has got to be smaller than the number of customers you tick off and lose by changing things.
Is the idea that all services converge on the same N billion people target audience who wants something almost entirely unlike the initial product? I feel like "marginal" doesn't really capture this nuance if so.
Existing userswon't leave when you tick them off, if you lock them in somehow (say, by having their social network all using your platform, or maybe by having previously sunk lots of time into curating a library of their favourite X on your platform).
I finally know what to call these idiotic trends that I've learned to recognise but couldn't name.
The one that grind my gears the most has been Microsoft breaking decades-old Windows paradigms to cater for Linux-developers-on-Windows, which is a very marginal, even actively disinterested group. All this at the expense of the 99.9% of their loyal user base.
For example, VS Code had the opposite shortcut (literally with the arrow keys going in opposing directions) for "go back in search history" to every other editor ever made for Windows... but matching the Linux equivalent.
Similarly, they recently broke "cls" to match the broken(!) behaviour of "clear" in Linux because of basically just one or two Linux users complaining in a GitHub Issue ticket. Windows users weren't listened to, because they're already users, not potential new users.
I just hate so so so much the Netflix of nowadays, they manage to keep me because of a few good movies/series and releasing new seasons of shows that I watched previously.
But otherwise, this interface is so much bat shit! Incredible to me that anyone can pretend to Product manager of something so badly designed and unergonomic.
The most important thing is "continue watching", that should be almost the first line, but no it is randomly spread at different levels. Some times you can't even find it, sometimes it lacks the movie that you were just watching and that reappears later.
It is very hard to find something to watch because they still show you the hundred of things that you saw already, or that old crappy movie that anyone saw ten times on tv, or things that you are not interested anyway.
And there is absolutely no way to filter to not be a frustrating experience.
In addition you have the asshole dark patterns like showing multiple times the same movie/series in a given category when you scroll.
My hypothesis is that they used to have a lot of great content, so that was their strength, and no they have very little valuable and recent content and as they don't want to be upfront about that, they use a lot of dark patterns to confuse you to still give the impression that they have an impressive catalog.
But that has the consequence of the user being frustrated, impossible to find something proper to watch, but still having to spend hours browsing in the app as you might think that the good thing exist but it is just you that can't find it.
It feels to me like they poached some high-level product executive from an intrusive ad company, trained in the art of dark patterns, and pointed them at their paying customers. It's a truly offensive way of looking at your user base, as solely engagement metrics to be optimized. It's what happens when an entire business is built around gamifying one KPI.
I really don't think bad Product Manager's is a good explanation for the UI. Any big company like Netflix is going to heavily A/B test any and every change to the UI. They will only ever add things that boost metrics like engagement. You may not like the UI; it may annoy you, but you should have some appreciation for the fact that they are using sophisticated techniques to optimize for what they care about.
For real, what the parent is suggesting is like appreciating that the burglar who robbed me cared enough about stealing from me to spend a week parked on my street learning my schedule.
Some people have turned to downloading qBittorrent[0] and use 1337x.to or thepiratebay.org (to start).
At some point these apps are so user hostile that it's simply isn't worth subscribing to. Their margins on content are so low on an individual—effectively zero since a flat fee means ~infinite content—that the effect on their business is incredibly small. Especially for people who have subscribed for months but don't watch consistently.
For movies that are 5+ years old, some would say that the companies have made the vast majority of what they will and copyright is so out of control, bought by those same companies, that it's not bad faith to counter-balance it.
I spent my last 3 months using Amazon Prime on my smart TV, opening the app, scrolling for 15 minutes through the same stuff as last time, turning off the TV and reading a book. I cancelled and now have 15 extra minutes reading time, though I do miss the cheap delivery it got me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
One can always do as in "The good place" show: put a bunch of hotties to talk about and play with moral philosophy. I think the show was somewhat evil in that approach, but at the same time, it was also morally sound...
Yes, but I also disagree to some degree because it's a similar argument to "I can watch philosophy TikToks and learn".
Certainly, philosophy TikToks are better than "boyfriend caught cheating prank" TikToks, but to some degree the medium is the message. And the question is whether we want the message of "everything is a short video, everything has a simple explanation and you can always swipe away and something else will be provided for you"
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.
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.
> Actually, they design for the average behavior of the average person.
They're generally designed for engagement. Nobody is particularly asking for this type of experience it's just that Tiktok has discovered the most addictive - eh hum, I mean engaging - experience thus far. So they're being copied.
Netflix is a little different though as if people open the app and always see the same top titles listed due to it being an alphabetical index, then they quickly think nothing new is ever there. Or, it's too hard to find. So they're tricking people into thinking there's a bunch of fresh/good content. There's also a cultural phenomenon where everyone discusses "what shows have you been watching lately?" so the Trending aspects of their recommendations is to help people get on board with the trend; and, to push momentum and create the trend too obviously.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
Exactly. And noticing that you might have some degree of ASD, or the like, enables you to also to notice typical symptomatic weaknesses, aside from strengths. Which might not be obvious to you otherwise. Addressing a weakness is much easier once it is identified. ("weird nerd" is too vague a diagnosis)
Ironically the old horses were faster! Run XP on modern hardware (if you can get it running at all) and you'll see what I mean. Explorer opens fully rendered in the span of a single frame (0.016 seconds). And XP was very slow and bloated for its time!
It'll do this even in VirtualBox, running about 20x snappier than the native host, which boggles my mind.
It's amazing how fast we can eat up new hardware capabilities. The old 6502 1-MHz CPUs were capable of running much more sophisticated software than most people today imagine, with 1/1000 or 1/millionth the hardware. And now we're asking LLMs to answer math questions, using billions of operations to perform something a single CPU instruction can handle.
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.
This is part of why I still have a MacBook2,1 running Snow Leopard. Even with its 4GB of memory and Core2Duo, it's optimized to prioritize my input. It also never changes, which is a form of stability I've come to cherish.
Another point is that you can train a horse, or even eat it if in dire straits. You own that horse. I can't disable things I want to disable, and names, locations, and features change (or are removed) with no notice between minor version updates. I can't tell you the last time I built something for a new Mac, or wanted to.
I don't know MacOS today, and it certainly doesn't make me feel like I own my computer.
I'm less harsh about modern Windows because I view it as amends for Microsoft causing the bot/ransomware crisis of the last 15 years. Still not for me, but at least I neuter it into usefulness.
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... :(
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.
I think they were designed at the time of less powerful machines so they had to be designed better. Nowadays there is not as much push to eke out every last bit of performance because there is loads of power at everyone's disposal and developers are pushed to focus on features first without being given time to refine performance because features mean adoption. So the bloat creeps up, and hardware makers keep designing more powerful machines which further enables the bloatiness. It is a vicious cycle.
i'm off grid right now and the only fast websites are hacker news, old reddit, and my app https://bookhead.net that is html + a little bit of htmx + a little vanilla javascript
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.
Sure, spotify has maintained a near-complete catalogue where Netflix hasnt.
But I no longer find Spotify any good at finding new music, beyond manually looking through artist catalogues.
For context, try out Pandora's recommendations. They haven't improved, yet they're orders of magnitude better than Spotify. The songs are hand annotated for style, content, etc. As a result, they recommend truly new songs with regularity that truly match the vibe.
Compare with Spotify, where everything is based on statistical "people also listened to X". Everything converges on some pop form of whatever genre and songs you've listened to a lot. It'll play odd, out-of context songs from the same artist before it'll find you new artists. Sure they have a few manicured playlists, but its nothing compared to the value Pandora has provided for years.
Spotify only has about half of the music that I like. A lot of it is remixes and jams from Japan that can only be found on youtube, soundcloud, or in some cases it's actually only available on private trackers.
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).
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!
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.
I think I am in the same boat as you. Knowing how the sausage is made only makes the flaws noticed even more offensive.
But I do think the GP has a point about the intentional friction and bullshit introduced into lots of modern software that wasn't even a twinkling in some CEOs eye way back when. Software has become adversarial to the user. Psychology has been weaponized to induce behaviors in users. Instead of users feeling utility and choice in using the software, they feel burdened, controlled. Or at least, I do. I try to make smart choices about what software I use to maintain my own volition.
These kinds of flaws are fundamentally different from the kinds of flaws in software from the past if only because of the order of magnitude increase of resources that can be mustered to accomplish it. And because they are exploitative.
I 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.
I have a lot more patience for flaws when I know they are not the result of a profit motive. For example if Linux deletes my graphics driver and I have to spend an hour reading up on fixing it.
If on the other hand I know that a flaw is a result of intentional, adversarial rent seeking behavior (eg ads in the search menu on Windows; introducing shitty UI design; dark patterns), my patience is non-existent.
Modern tech problem seems to land in the second category a lot more often than it did 15+ years ago. It is the environment that has changed, not me.
One aspect of this that I think deserves more attention is the reasons.
It's one thing when the flaws are there because of the limitations of hardware (and you understand the reasoning behind it). It's very different when you know that limitations are artificially imposed on you for the sake of someone's profit.
And mind you, it certainly did exist back then - stuff like early DRM schemes with hardware keys etc. And I was just as annoyed by them.
Regardless of the degree that is true for the parent poster, those (and more) qualitative differences can also be felt among different pieces of software that are all quite new.
Kids nowadays are suprisingly proficient and using phones and computers.
...because they just click "AGREE" to every popup. They sign up. They give away their phone number or their one email address or they do the subscription, then cancel it later (or forget). They enter their credit card because they don't have any money to take anyway.
I think it's about software, just because back then there was a lot less of it. It was easier to navigate when the OS didn't have a million and one features and you just launched an app you wanted to you and could mostly trust that there wasn't going to be an ad or another feature in the way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's the same with mobile payment. AFAIK there isn't a single bank left in The Netherlands which has its own mobile tap-to-pay app, everyone has switched to Google Wallet.
Good for them that they want to save a few bucks on developers, but why do I have to give my payment info to the devil? It's a third party which has nothing to do with the payment itself, and the fact that some banks used to have their own tap-to-pay apps shows that it clearly isn't a technical requirement.
Did a quick stalk based on your Brazilian name... I am talking about your competitor ofc!
I have an account with you guys too but haven't kept up with the developments at all. I do wonder what direction you're going in - particularly given the tech company valuation the US market has given ya.
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".)
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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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>".
> I don't think it's about expense, it's more about hiding the fact that their catalogue is actually really small.
I agree with you for Netflix.
However, Youtube's catalog is almost certainly larger today than it was a decade ago. Even if you could somehow weight by quality, I think it would be hard to argue that Youtube's content catalog has gotten worse. Maybe average quality per video has gone down, but there is so much content on Youtube nowadays, assuming you're able to find it.
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 fear old reddit is going to be killed off this year. They're getting rid of the red envelope for messages/replies, they've pushed the notification and chat with red icons into old reddit and more and more content seems to "accidentally" link to new reddit.
They left it alone for years but now they're converging them, looks like it's only a matter of time
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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!
OPs specific complaints about Netflix and Spotify are mostly a result of their success. Back in 2012 Netflix had a lot of movies because Hollywood didn't value streaming and were willing to sell the streaming right for most of their content for tiny amounts of money. And there were no other streamer.
Spotify is in a similar boat. The music companies didn't value streaming and were willing to sell their entire catalog to the one player in the ecosystem (or in the case of music, to everyone for the same low price)
But also, personalization actually drives a ton of revenue. When I worked at Netflix, when the recommendation system went down and we defaulted to curated lists, streaming would drop 20%. And that was in 2013. I can only imagine what the drop is today when that system goes down.
Personalization drives a ton of revenue, and TikTok is the best at it, so it's no surprise that OP sees everything "going to TikTok"
Weren’t the big record labels terrified that streaming would cannibalize CD sales? I think it was a pretty huge thing that Spotify got them onboard at all. I’m not sure how much that matters to your overall point but saying they ”didn’t value streaming” doesn’t seem quite right with how I remember the discussion at the time - they were afraid of it because they could see its value, and how that might disrupt their lucrative plastic disc business.
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.
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”
For those who don't, reading "Competing Against Luck" by Clayton Christensen will dramatically improve your ability to create successful products/services.
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).
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)
All creative content-based products face a similar fate once they receive VC money or go public. In both cases, it places pressure on them to grow at a rate that is not sustainable for creative content. This is one of the main reasons why Ed Catmull of Pixar backed selling the company to Disney. He realized that even if Pixar produces a blockbuster every year and is a profitable company, the fact that it's publicly traded will require them to always deliver increasing growth year-over-year. Selling to Disney helped shield them from the fate that has befallen many other studios.
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.
This gets especially interesting when you consider that horses are still better than motorized vehicles at accessing certain terrain. For example, a horse can trivially climb a steep hill in the wilderness with no road, or ford a river with no nearby bridges, that even rugged ATVs can't really handle. The vast majority of transportation needs are better served by motorized vehicles, but horses still have some unique advantages and in some areas are unbeatable. Now that said, some of the freaky AI robots with legs might finally render horses inferior, but those are pretty inaccessible to most people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They don't need you as the product - they found better products their customers would rather buy. My dad is one of the better products. I've seen what Facebook turned him into.
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)
For those with large video libraries on their local hard drive, please consider trying my MIT Open Source Video Hub App - with scrub-able thumbnail previews of all your videos.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
The article beautifully captures the tension between innovation and addressing immediate needs. Sometimes incremental improvements (faster horses) are exactly what's needed, not paradigm shifts. As engineers, we should evaluate whether we're solving real problems or just chasing novelty for its own sake.
Here is the thing: netflix and spotify are not in the "my X collection" business. They sell subscriptions to content and the apps reflect that. I am 100% in your/OPs boat but i would expect (niche and /or open source) apps to pop up that just make my collections of my content from other sources nice and the way nerds like us want. We have a right under EU data portability laws to do exactly that BUT companies break the laws to prohibit users taking control of their data. The only reason this is not changing is that we are not organised and there is no funded organisation suing the crap out of these companies until the final instance to give us our data.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
As bad as Netflix is, honestly the UX is the best amongst major streaming services.
For me, the cardinal sin of a streaming service is, if I open your service every single day and watch the next episode of ONE show, then the next time I open your service, PLEASE HAVE MY SHOW AT THE TOP OF THE HOME PAGE.
This is such a simple and obvious user journey, but the majority of streaming services, on purpose or not, fuck it up. The number of times I've opened a streaming service, scroll through the entire home page with the shitty tv remote, then had to type the name of my show manually in search. Makes me want to unsubscribe right then and there and just use Plex instead.
With LLMs the ability to create your own experience whilst using services as "databases" is really possible.
My crazy though is that this is where the internet will go.
One of the big problems with SaaS is that the apps are tuned to increase company profit - not user agency.
All that will flip. Agents are the first barrage in that direction but the movement is only just starting.
One barrier is configuration (code at scale) - ie a way to communicate exactly what you want.
Once we have that we compile from our needs (configuration) to an app thats exactly what we want backed by our accounts on amazon, uber, google, openai as databases and processing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
I wouldn’t mind Spotify’s changes if they actually worked well. But the podcasts thing is a nightmare and doesn’t work well, and I have no interest in Audiobooks or courses as part of my subscription.
There seems to be some laws of (human) nature about these sorts of things at work here like how all programs eventually evolve into either Microsoft Excel or an operating system (or both) or how all basic cable channels eventually end up programming Law & Order reruns.
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.
I definitely want a plaid horse with a dashboard, a round steering wheel and turn-signal/drive-select stalks.
and I want to use a buggy whip to smack the fingers of people reaching for their touchscreens to spring for the in-car-purchases and seat-warmer subscriptions
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
This is such a good article. No notes. I share the same annoyance with how often algorithms are used - if we could give power users an ability to say "yes, I know what I want" and bypass all the recommendations, that would be ideal.
Me too, but you and I cannot afford a faster horse, or even the same horse we once had. The horse they use to offer was an illusion, a bait for the new Tiktok thing. Sooner or later, people will forget that horses once exist.
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.)
The diversity of mediums chart at the end doesn't make any sense. What are the multiple lines? And at the end if he is saying everything converges to TikTok, wouldn't the TikTok point on the graph be on the axis for 0 diversity?
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.
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?
"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.
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.
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.
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...:(")
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)
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...
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.
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.
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.
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
I feel that it basically comes down to promotion driven development. Things are changed because they are justifications for someone promotion. Cut the bloat!
I simply hate that good services get ruined because there's money to be made by providing a different service to a broader group of people. It's not quite enshittification, it's companies making something that serves a relatively small group of folks well into a thing that serves a very large group of people in the highest-ROI way possible.
Companies no longer have a target user. The target user is whoever can be juiced for as many pennies or eyeball-seconds as possible. There's no persona for user stories, it's "literally whoever we can get this in front of for as long as possible". It's about the lowest common denominator.
Which implies, these products are not "designed" anymore. "Designed" implies that the creator made choices to make the product better for a target user. But there's no target user. When your service has a billion users, it's not possible to design for _anyone_. Mouse traps aren't "designed" for the mice, they're built for the people who don't want mice around. Services aren't "designed" for a billion people to interact with, they're built for the owners to make as much money as possible.
Well, I see it sort of like, yes, people might want faster horses. And maybe they'd prefer cars to horses. But if your cars start poking me in the eye and flashing blinding lights at me, I'm going to consider going back to a horse.
Part of the process of enshittification is changing the set of needs served by a product, and, almost invariably, adding new functionality that no one asked for and that they probably don't want. And usually that new functionality is a sort of Trojan horse (a faster Trojan horse?) that offers something superficially interesting but is really just a means of wedging some kind of revenue generation into the experience the user really wants to have.
People often do want cars rather than faster horses, but they want the cars they want, not the ones that will make someone else the most money.
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.
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.
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.
What frustrates me is that many people that claim to want a faster horse don’t actually use them where they are available
Bandcamp to me is the ideal “horse” for music (and I’m praying it stays a horse)
Those complaining about Chrome dominance but still not personally using Firefox is another example (even with all of Mozilla’s controversies, Firefox is still the “fastest horse” available imo)
Not being satisfied with the horse selection is understandable, but actively furthering the obsolescence of the available horses is not (even if the individual impact is minimal)
The "faster horses" comment is unfortunate, both because Henry Ford was a huge Nazi and because it's a dramatically wrong idea of what people actually wanted that only makes sense if you're already so car-brained[0] to think that the only alternative to a car is a horse. At least in cities, you had trains, trams, and omnibuses; not to mention walking was also an option.
There's a tendency in consumer tech companies to look at TikTok as the ultimate goal: everyone wants a pipeline to pump entertainment slurry into, and the old versions of the product are just worse slurry pipelines. But this is wrong. Old Spotify and Netflix aren't "faster horses". They're the train connecting a walkable urban core that got replaced with a never-on-time bus route[1] while the government encouraged everyone to move into car-dependent suburban prisons.
Like cars, entertainment slurry pipelines exist for the benefit of the pipeline owner, not the creator nor the viewer. Nobody asks for TikTok, it's just a global minima in the reward function[2] of "how do we most actively exploit creative industry". The platform owners want you to forget about the artists on their platforms so that those artists can't tell you to move to another platform. It's akin to one of the nightmare scenarios trotted out by copyright maximalists during the Napster Wars of the early 2000s, except the owning class now has significant economic interest in the platforms, so it's OK now.
[0] I have a pet theory that cars were a fascist long-con to destroy cities and atomize society to avoid the creation of class solidarity and durable political movements against large business interests.
[1] Remember when Netflix rented DVDs? And had almost everything, because physical media has really robust consumer protections?
[2] If you think my "cars are fascist" theory is insane, wait until I talk about AI.
Ford wasn't interested in either your horse, or your transportation need. Ford was interested in what you'd buy. That means when there was ample competition, you'd likely get something that very much felt like a faster horse, because... you did want to go faster than your existing horse, and you didn't care the new thing wasn't horse-shaped.
Fast-forward until meaningful local competition is gone, and you get the F150, the Bronco, and the Mustang. It isn't really what you want (for most people, I know some of you love yours, moving on), but given the other choices, general availability, and popular sentiment, it's close enough that enough people will say, "OK, fine, definitely not a horse any more, but still sorta works for me."
You'll get bland pablum that's smeared out across the average opinion of a sufficient amount of people while maximizing total profit under the curve. That's the logical outcome of any mass production.
IOW: If you care about what you need, support open source authors. Write open source. And be prepared to tinker to tailor it to your needs. Horses are individual, and need care and support more than your car does.
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.
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.
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.
Welcome to the web 3.0 mindset: changing for the sake of changing and having more bullet points on advertising, moving fast and breaking things because the innovation behind a fancy page can't be wrong even when it ruins the experience of most users. Thank you, Open Source, for giving me the tools and freedom of choice I can use to completely ignore or at least make less painful the experience.
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.
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.
You are the horse. Platforms realized they don't have to keep making faster horses or cars or whatnot if they just turn their users into zombie-like creatures who mindlessly click on what's presented to them albeit just to chase that next carrot of dopamine.
Netflix and Spotify are designed this way because they're subscription services. They need to convince you they always have a lot of new stuff, all the time, so that you don't cancel your subscription.
They don't want you to think they're some static libraries of content. They make their websites like interactive billboards.
Sometimes I want a faster horse. Problem is horses are no longer in high demand. It's a niche market now. I may have to pay a premium or put in some extra work to get the horse I want. It's just the way of things.
Not quite the point of the article, but Kawasaki recently announced the Coreleo, a (faster?) robot horse you can ride and holy shit I want one. No chance this thing sees the light of day, and the video is a CGI render, but oh man.
On trips to remote sites I never miss an opportunity to explain to the younger guys that "when I was younger Spotify was called MP3s and it was made of files that you had on your device!" and then proceed to play late 90s EDM until we get back into mobile range.
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.
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.
"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."
They could try. The budget for the first seasons of Friends was the same as any other sitcom of that era.
Sitcoms would be perfect for streaming companies but non of them seem to get that for some reason.
> Sitcoms would be perfect for streaming companies but non of them seem to get that for some reason.
The second longest (by episode count) non-animated, scripted original series at Netflix is a sitcom, The Upshaws. I’m not aware of any streaming service that doesn't do original sitcoms.
I’m not convinced, though, that sitcoms are all that great a fit for streaming—I don't think any genre other than maybe talk shows has been more dependent for initial launch on pre-streaming broadcast/cable viewership habits and viewing block placement to catch people already watching already-successful similarly targeted shows.
The problem is that you can't parasitically launch a sitcom off on streaming by placing it in a subsequent timeslot to an establish sitcom with similar audience targeting. At least not with the present streaming model, though I suppose if streamers would bother to make more advanced autoplay viewing models than by-series you could do something similar.
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.
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.
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