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It dawns on me now that perhaps every market and every community is fated to suffer some variation of the Eternal September effect at some certain critical poin
by pen2l 4y ago
It dawns on me now that perhaps every market and every community is fated to suffer some variation of the Eternal September effect at some certain critical point of capturing majority market share. Every community that matures enough to have argued certain key topics will have decided with confidence on those topics and not kowtowing to the consensus will seem heretical -- the stagnation in some measure spells its doom, Google is thinking how to deal with an increasingly adversarial ground in which many know how to game it with sophisticated SEO thus rendering its main capability a little bit muted, sellers saw that Amazon was a dominant market and sought to exploit the rating system to their advantage, and the end-result is a market saturated with players who were adept at gaming the system.
The interesting flipside observation is that in each of these cases, we see the ground fertile then for a new approach to bud out -- a manifestation of Goodhart's law being consummate. New communities arise in the ashes of old ones, ChatGPT is maybe coming to displace Google in some places, what will take place of Amazon now that its rating system and reputation has tarnished?
- erichocean 4y ago> the stagnation in some measure spells its doom I'm not sure where you learned about "Eternal September", but it's the exact opposite of what you're describing: not stagnation of culture, but degradation to a pre-existing, high-quality culture due to the rapid influx of new individuals who don't give a shit about maintaining it. Amazon is going down with Americans precisely because the (predominantly) Chinese sellers on there now couldn't care less about the "nice online garden" Americans created and are instead using up the pre-existing cultural capital Americans had built up for their own selfish advancement—destroying the garden in the process. But yeah, sure, maybe after the garden has been burned to the ground, something new will replace it. Sounds great.
- pessimizer 4y agoAmazon isn't failing on customer experience because of the Chinese. The Chinese didn't make Amazon lower their standards so far that it became profitable for Chinese factories to operate on Amazon the way they do. Chinese factories would also make money on a non-shitty Amazon.
- comte7092 4y agoWhy make this into a weird nationalism issue when Amazon is the one that is responsible for what’s on their platform? Apple is a similarly massive company that prioritizes curation on their marketplace. Whatever you may feel about App Store policies, Apple has managed the reputation of their online store much better than Amazon (though I will grant that there is somewhat of a difference between physical and digital products).
- pessimizer 4y agoWhat we need is antitrust. Eventually companies capture so much of the market that they can afford to get lazy and profit-take, and still grow. Then the shittier they get, the shittier they have to get in order to maintain financial returns. The decline has to accelerate. Unless the reason they've become unprofitable again is because they're reinvesting before they've fallen too far, but there's a collective action problem in that depending on how many big shareholders there are.
- BizarroLand 4y agoWe need a government that cares about the individual over the corporate. I think we still mostly have it, but there are enough chinks in the armor to introduce doubt. We need Antitrust on steroids coupled with vision and a hand on the wheel steering the boat.