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I would argue that the infrastructure we have could do a much better job of discoverability & catering to a variety of interests. Selection is good & necessary,

by ip26 8y ago

I would argue that the infrastructure we have could do a much better job of discoverability & catering to a variety of interests. Selection is good & necessary, but none of the big news players have been able to figure out that I'm far more interested in Tommy Caldwell than Kim Kardashian, so to this day pop entertainment headlines I never visit continue to scroll past. Tailoring to interests could broaden the range of useful content that generates views. I eventually went back to RSS, picked feeds from twenty or so minor news sources focused on my interests, and in general I'm much more satisfied. I eventually started using Pocket as well to retain a small trickle of "best of", which has the best ratio of interesting headlines (to me) I've encountered in an aggregator.

doctorpangloss 8y ago
Discoverability has long ago reduced to collaborative filtering. It works because it services majority tastes specifically at the expense of minority ones. Put another way, imagine you’re a PM trying to make a chart go up and to the right. Here’s a magic algorithm that gives you best users more of what they want, and ones for whom the product doesn’t work no reason to stick around so they leave. An increasing numerator with a decreasing denominator. That’s a hyperbolic upwards curve! Promote that PM! You let the prisoners run the asylum in this case, choosing which metrics they will be evaluated on, that totally runs counter to the whole point of building platforms. As long as your inbound user count exceeds churn due to booting out people with minority tastes—which a PM EXTREMELY RARELY had anything to do with—the PM’s career takes off. No dude, discoverability as it is defined by every tech company is killing culture. And it’s Product Management that’s holding the knife.
- MrEldritch 8y ago
  I don't buy this argument - specifically, I don't buy that there are normbie pleb users with "majority tastes" as opposed to the patricians with refined, elite "minority tastes." Everybody has some minority tastes. Everyone's got their own long tail of stuff they like. Obviously there's stuff that's more popular than other stuff - otherwise they wouldn't be majority tastes - but it's not like someone who watches Jimmy Kimmel on Youtube therefore doesn't also enjoy, like, woodworking channels. The difference is, I guess, what you're willing to settle for - if the algorithm discovers you like a thing that's easy to find more of, it will really start shoving that in your face, because it's easy, and if you're not persistent enough to keep seeking out specialty content despite the tide, then the popular stuff is what you're going to get.

by ip26 8y ago

doctorpangloss 8y ago

Discoverability has long ago reduced to collaborative filtering. It works because it services majority tastes specifically at the expense of minority ones. Put another way, imagine you’re a PM trying to make a chart go up and to the right. Here’s a magic algorithm that gives you best users more of what they want, and ones for whom the product doesn’t work no reason to stick around so they leave. An increasing numerator with a decreasing denominator. That’s a hyperbolic upwards curve! Promote that PM! You let the prisoners run the asylum in this case, choosing which metrics they will be evaluated on, that totally runs counter to the whole point of building platforms. As long as your inbound user count exceeds churn due to booting out people with minority tastes—which a PM EXTREMELY RARELY had anything to do with—the PM’s career takes off. No dude, discoverability as it is defined by every tech company is killing culture. And it’s Product Management that’s holding the knife.

MrEldritch 8y ago
I don't buy this argument - specifically, I don't buy that there are normbie pleb users with "majority tastes" as opposed to the patricians with refined, elite "minority tastes." Everybody has some minority tastes. Everyone's got their own long tail of stuff they like. Obviously there's stuff that's more popular than other stuff - otherwise they wouldn't be majority tastes - but it's not like someone who watches Jimmy Kimmel on Youtube therefore doesn't also enjoy, like, woodworking channels. The difference is, I guess, what you're willing to settle for - if the algorithm discovers you like a thing that's easy to find more of, it will really start shoving that in your face, because it's easy, and if you're not persistent enough to keep seeking out specialty content despite the tide, then the popular stuff is what you're going to get.