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Maybe companies could offer healthier versions of their products for a price if customer awareness rises.
by corv 9y ago
Maybe 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.