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Tweet 54 agrees? "The magic in the system was the person yanking 24 beautiful treasuries a day out of the sea of shirtless dudes."

ertian 4y ago
The thing is...that doesn't scale. If somebody was still manually updating the homepage with a handful of curated beautiful items, then we wouldn't be talking about it because none of us would've heard of it. Or maybe it would have transformed into a mad scramble to snatch up the limited, curated items. Part of this thread suggested it was headed in that direction. In either case, it would've been more or less irrelevant, and we'd be talking about some other site full of AliExpress garbage instead.
- musingsole 4y ago
  > then we wouldn't be talking about it because none of us would've heard of it That's defeatist logic. Sure, scaling with a single person doing it is likely impossible, but all of this reads to me as a bunch of technologists being utterly unable to integrate the human element into their systems. The conclusion is that a human aesthetic sense was needed -- first to filter dickpics and second to put together a gestalt page. I can imagine ways to scale that, but it hinges on trusting the human element -- something technologists and investors are utterly incapable of.
  - ertian 4y ago
    It's hard for me to imagine, in a commercial setting. Wikipedia demonstrates that it's possible, but the financial aspect makes it so hard to manage incentives. Sellers have every incentive to game the system, up to and including bribing the curators, and curators presumably like money as much as anybody else. You can monitor the behavior of one guy sitting in a room performing curation, but when you start scaling up and have thousands of curators, all over the world, doing the same thing for thousands of different combinations of language, subculture or market segment, etc...it's hard to picture how it could work.

ertian 4y ago

The thing is...that doesn't scale. If somebody was still manually updating the homepage with a handful of curated beautiful items, then we wouldn't be talking about it because none of us would've heard of it. Or maybe it would have transformed into a mad scramble to snatch up the limited, curated items. Part of this thread suggested it was headed in that direction. In either case, it would've been more or less irrelevant, and we'd be talking about some other site full of AliExpress garbage instead.

musingsole 4y ago
> then we wouldn't be talking about it because none of us would've heard of it That's defeatist logic. Sure, scaling with a single person doing it is likely impossible, but all of this reads to me as a bunch of technologists being utterly unable to integrate the human element into their systems. The conclusion is that a human aesthetic sense was needed -- first to filter dickpics and second to put together a gestalt page. I can imagine ways to scale that, but it hinges on trusting the human element -- something technologists and investors are utterly incapable of.
- ertian 4y ago
  It's hard for me to imagine, in a commercial setting. Wikipedia demonstrates that it's possible, but the financial aspect makes it so hard to manage incentives. Sellers have every incentive to game the system, up to and including bribing the curators, and curators presumably like money as much as anybody else. You can monitor the behavior of one guy sitting in a room performing curation, but when you start scaling up and have thousands of curators, all over the world, doing the same thing for thousands of different combinations of language, subculture or market segment, etc...it's hard to picture how it could work.