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He's absolutely right but how do you change the incentive from maximizing time spent to improving lives? I find it unlikely that ads are the only problem, afte
by corv 9y ago
He's absolutely right but how do you change the incentive from maximizing time spent to improving lives?
I find it unlikely that ads are the only problem, after all Netflix wants people to binge just as much as Spotify does and the customers have already paid.
- ShannonAlther 9y agoNetflix's incentive structure is slightly different: they want their clients to enjoy the service, so that they will be inclined to subscribe to them in the future. Spotify, on the other hand, wants to maximize time spent using the service, which in turn maximizes exposure to advertisements and thus inflates their ad revenue. For Spotify, binge use is the end goal, whereas for Netflix it is merely a consequence of producing an enjoyable service. You're right though, it would be difficult to directly incentivize something as nebulous as 'improving lives' beyond providing services that do just that, since corporate incentives generally follow the money.
- corv 9y agoMaybe companies could offer healthier versions of their products for a price if customer awareness rises.
- ShannonAlther 9y agoWell, grocery stores already do that. And it's hard to imagine what a 'healthier version' of an app, say Spotify, would look like. Unless you're suggesting they move to Netflix's business model, but that's a market niche that's already filled.
- corv 9y agoI'd imagine the spectrum of software healthiness is something along the lines of: Snapchat -> Facebook -> Reddit -> Hacker News -> BBS (Bulletin Board Systems)
- ShannonAlther 9y agoI confess that I can't see what gradient this ranking follows. It looks like the users get progressively more anonymous, except Reddit has the most anonymous users and it's in the middle; it also looks like the average use time per day goes down, except I have no idea whether that's the case.
- corv 9y agoBBS, Usenet and Email don't have ratings, likes or follower counts. I think the gradient follows less 'dopaminergic' services that don't offer rewards beyond the intrinsic content people send.
- ShannonAlther 9y agoAh, makes sense. But ratings and likes serve another purpose: determining which content is worth looking at. Snapchat aside, those services have the following they do because the content is tailored to the user: Facebook has their algorithms, r/all is filtered by 10M users, and so on. But HN has an advantage in that it has a specific audience (the sort of people who know that Ycombinator is a thing). So the content is already probably relevant. Maybe that model has advantages we haven't fully explored yet.