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.
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.