16 ms·

For any given thing or category of thing, a tiny minority of the human population will be enthusiasts of that thing, but those enthusiasts will have an outsize

• soco 2y ago
  Then, how could a business identify its (or market's) trend-setters, enthusiasts, or whatever we call them, which will push towards something new? I see this as essential for either making the business better, shinier, or to avoid losing users.
  • _kush 2y ago
    It has to be built by those enthusiasts
  • ozim 2y ago
    That’s leg work you have to do on your own. Just like football scouts need to actually visit some niche teams and watch not that interesting stuff to find talent before it is too late. With tech it might be easier because you might create niche groups so those people come to you. Just like PG created HN. Nowadays HN is too mainstream so all ideas here are seem already popular so it is like going to scout high school t am that won local championship everyone already knows which players are lined for pro contracts.
  • another-dave 2y ago
    By risk taking on good ideas rather than always trying to pivot your way from the status quo. Product-Market fit is great if you're developing a SaaS business but it's not necessarily going to give you new inventions — something new is speaking to a potential gap in the market that doesn't currently exist.
  • cjs_ac 2y ago
    By participating in the community. Content moderation on HN is so much better than on Facebook because dang is one of us, whereas on Facebook, it's a team of people in a developing country, in a different cultural context. Netflix needs to be run by film enthusiasts, not UX engineers trying to disguise the fact that all the good IP has been pulled back to the streaming platforms of the original producers. Spotify needs to be run by music enthusiasts, not people pushing covers of pop songs to avoid paying royalties to the original artists. And so on. Indie Hackers is full of people trying to flog their shit AI-powered marketing SaaS, because they've never done anything other than software engineering, so they don't know any good problems to solve. There are uncountably many good problems out there, each with thousands of people who would pay you money to solve them, but those people don't know their problems can be solved by a computer, so you have to go out into the world to find them yourself.
    • germinalphrase 2y ago
      The Hustler and the Nerd are the co-founding duo. Domain expertise is an obvious plus, but a “non-technical” Domain Expert is a third wheel.
    • bsoles 2y ago
      > ... because they've never done anything other than software engineering, so they don't know any good problems to solve. That is indeed a big problem with software engineering/engineers today. No other expertise other than being a framework monkey.
  • edmundsauto 2y ago
    Teams should identify their drivers of key metrics and do power user analysis based on this. A halfway decent analytics team should be thinking this way. Ultimately, analytics are just a view into the business. This thread is complaining about doctors not using microscopes when diagnosing system issues - sometimes a narrow slice is important, sometimes you need to zoom out. If you focus on your "early adopters" or power users exclusively, without understanding how they affect the business, then you are at risk of building things that most of your user base doesn't want. Power User Analysis: https://andrewchen.com/power-user-curve/ https://andrewchen.com/power-user-curve/
• sokoloff 2y ago
  > Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches For street usage, I think those cars are popular because they’re beautiful more than because they’re fast (or because enthusiasts like them). My utterly soulless Lexus will drive more than fast enough to get me in serious trouble. No one will look at it and feel stirred by its beauty, whereas the typical Ferrari or Porsche coupe will look at least appealing to most and beautiful to many, even those who can’t tell the three marques apart or even unaided recall the name Lamborghini.
  • JKCalhoun 2y ago
    I would say they're popular because they are expensive. It's bragging rights, conspicuous consumption…
    • thfuran 2y ago
      If they were cheap, I might have one. As is, I never will.
    • world2vec 2y ago
      But people desire them as a conspicuous symbol because some people decades ago were really into fast cars and picked those brands as the best of the best. It was the true enthusiasts that promoted them and then other people copied them because they wanted to be in the same "gang" and over time that evolved into a status symbol, far removed from the original one. But it did start with a small group of true fans.
      • JKCalhoun 2y ago
        And professional racing.
    • shakna 2y ago
      If it was just expense, then Koenigsegg would be a household name. Most enthusiasts will know them, but the average person won't. There's something more that leads culture in such a way to uphold a particular brand.
• another-dave 2y ago
  which is also what I feel about the Spotify algorthim at times — no matter what I'm listening to, it invariably brings me back to what it thinks are my "old reliables" once it gets onto recommending stuff. I might just listen to it, if I have it on in the background, which then in turn feeds the algorithm that it made the "correct choice", but it's a million miles away from, say, listening to a radio DJ where you like their rough output but they're cherry-picking what to play next.
  • fourneau 2y ago
    To this point, I've been using Qobuz as an alternative and it's recommendation engine is laughably bad, but the experience is somehow better. I'll get the most random songs pop up in the list, and sometimes it's a very pleasant surprise. In the world of music discovery a bad recommendation engine is maybe better than a hyper-fine-tuned one.
    • bee_rider 2y ago
      FWIW good old Pandora now has options to influence their how their stations explore (so, you can for example pick “discovery” to have it try and find similar artists it hasn’t shown you as often).
  • nthingtohide 2y ago
    > if I have it on in the background, which then in turn feeds the algorithm that it made the "correct choice" I have a very horrible case of this. One day at night, I slept listening to lofi playlist. The next week all my recommendations were screwed. Horrible assumption on the part of algorithm.
    • fer 2y ago
      I have something worse. One morally questionable video popped in my Instagram that showed some disabled person doing something outrageously stupid capitalising on their disability for engagement. I didn't like it, I didn't share it, I didn't do any other thing than just stare at it in shock. Big mistake. For over 6 months that became +50% of my feed. Incredible and depressing amount of people monetising the disability of their friends, siblings, children, or their own. Really effed up content that makes you stop and say wtf out loud. But they also earn a living. But they should do it in a honorable manner. But maybe they don't have the chance. So I flag as not interested but that just swaps those videos with new BRAND NEW "content creators" of this kind that I hadn't yet seen. Wow thanks Instagram. At some point they changed something in the algorithm and now those videos rarely pop anymore, and I'm wary and scroll away fast.
• subpixel 2y ago
  I’m experiencing this in Peloton-land. They have an app that purports to be for home gym enthusiasts but is actually optimized for people who want to take instructor-led classes on their phone. Certain features don’t work as advertised and I quickly reasoned that while this is a pain in my side most users don’t care. If they did, Peloton would fix it.
• otabdeveloper4 2y ago
  > the change was driven by enthusiasts recommending the latest and greatest to their less-technically-inclined friends and family No it wasn't. It was driven by shady crapware distribution schemes and intentionally subtly broken sites under the big G umbrella.
• SamBam 2y ago
  > However, that analysis will aggregate its results over all your users, and won't pick out the enthusiasts, who will shape discourse and public opinion about your service. Consequently, your results will be dominated by people who don't really have an opinion, and just take whatever they're given. > In all of these changes, most of the userbase didn't really care what browser they were using: the change was driven by enthusiasts recommending the latest and greatest to their less-technically-inclined friends and family. I'm confused as to whether your saying change is caused by catering to the median who doesn't care, or the enthusiast who recommends the latest and greatest. You seem to be saying both.
  • cjs_ac 2y ago
    Yeah, I could have been clearer there. The browser developers started by catering to the enthusiasts, who switched. The enthusiasts then told the majority of the userbase that the new thing was better, and so the majority switched, causing the large-scale changes in market share.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• scarface_74 2y ago
  You’re giving it way too much of a positive spend. None of the companies are using analytics to increase the desirability for the majority of users. They are doing it to increase “engagement” and so more people will stay on their site longer. Why else wouldn’t Netflix show the “continue watching” row first instead of forcing you to scroll past algorithmic generated crap? It is the same reason that Google went from describing success as people getting off their site faster and going to one of the “ten blue links” to the shit show it is today.
  • signatoremo 2y ago
    Huh, why should “continue watching” be the first row? If I don’t care enough to finish a movie I may as well start a new one. At the very least it’s not a clear choice.
    • scarface_74 2y ago
      Binge watching TV series. The easiest signal that you don’t want to continue watching a movie would be to thumbs down it.
    • butlike 2y ago
      On the flip side, the only reason I don't finish a movie or TV show is because I run out of time. Either it's time for bed, time to go, or I fell asleep. In all 3 cases I'm still interested in the movie; it's why I put it on in the first place!
    • pbhjpbhj 2y ago
      Well, of it was user-centred then "because that use scrolls to 'continue watching' more often than not". Why not let users choose? Because, sadly, it's about money and not about users.
  • bobxmax 2y ago
    What's the difference between that which optimized for what you call "engagement" and what the average user wants? Presumably the best thing for Netflix is to have a happy userbase, so why do you assume it wouldn't optimize for that?
• chasd00 2y ago
  Luxury watches are a good analogy too. A $5 watch from the gas station will give you the time just fine but there’s a market for watches costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
  • bookofjoe 2y ago
    $31 million: https://www.gq.com/story/patek-philippe-31-million-most-expensive-watch https://www.gq.com/story/patek-philippe-31-million-most-expe...
  • tiagod 2y ago
    In the case of watches, the luxury ones will actually be much worse at telling time than the $5 quartz one, by design!
  • nthingtohide 2y ago
    You don't even need a watch. Smartphones can tell you time (you can configure to show times for many timezones) yet there is a market for watches (luxury or normal)
    • xigoi 2y ago
      A watch is more convenient. I don’t need to take my phone out of my pocket to see the time, I just look at my wrist.
      • karn97 2y ago
        I think you're quite underestimating how many times a person takes their phone out and it's way more than they turn their wrist around to see their watch
        • xigoi 2y ago
          I bought a watch about half a year ago just because I was tired of taking out my phone to check the time, so I know what I’m talking about.
• yapyap 2y ago
  eh, I feel like this is a nicely typed out comment but it hits some wrong notes. 1. I wouldn’t say the car veands you mentioned are popular because they can hit high speeds. In my experience nearly any car can with the right engine and equipment in it (of course due to weight distribution and other details I assume they’re not all equally safe but that aside). Personally when I look at those brands I think they’re sleek and pretty and when I feel like wanting one it’s because they’re expensive cars, driven by the rich. They’re not chosen only by the rich cause they have the best taste, they’re chosen by the rich because they are the only ones to have the financial means to afford one. Also I feel like the changes made based on analytics arent made to please (more) users but to make as much money as possible, whether that be pleasing users in the starting phases of your company or in the latter phases when you already dominate the market squeezing money out of your big existing userbase.
• whall6 2y ago
  Wow - this is great insight. I hadn’t thought of it this way. Thank you for sharing.
• tlogan 2y ago
  > But who knows - maybe that really > is the most profitable way to run a tech business. Yes, I agree. This does seem to be the most profitable model for running a tech business: maximizing user engagement or increasing the time users spend on the platform. Whether that’s achieved through intentionally convoluted UI or by aggressively surfacing certain content, the end goal remains the same. That said, I don’t think there’s much room left for significant innovation in video streaming interfaces. The core challenge continues to be content — whoever offers the best or most compelling library wins. UI changes might tweak engagement metrics by a few percentage points, but they’re marginal compared to the impact of strong content. At the end of the day, if there’s a great movie or series to watch, people will show up. If the content isn’t there, no amount of clever interface design will convince someone to spend 30 minutes on something they’re not actually interested in.
• _kush 2y ago
  This is the cycle I keep seeing: Most great products start out for enthusiasts and often by enthusiasts. They’re opinionated, sharp, sometimes rough, but exciting. Then VC funding comes in, and the product has to appeal to a broader audience. Things get smoothed out and the metrics rule decisions. Eventually, the original enthusiasts feel left out. The product’s no longer for them. So a new product comes out, started again by enthusiasts for enthusiasts. And the cycle repeats - unless someone chooses to grow slowly and sustainably, without raising, and stays focused on the niche.
  • bluGill 2y ago
    Can can git rich by growing slowly in many cases - but it will be a long hard road. You could instead sell out today and get rich instantly. If you start the slow growth path at 30 and retire at 65 you will overall make more money from that thing vs someone who sells out at 35. There are some catches though. The person who sells out can go on to the next thing which in sum total may be more sell out enough to make far more over their lifetime, while the slow growth plan you are stuck. The slow growth is over very slow at first, you often spend 10 years making far less than someone who is "working for the man", then 15 more years more or less even, and only then start making good money. There is no guarantee that you will be successful, some people spend their entire life making less than they could "working for the man"; others go bankrupt when a new VC competitor suddenly gets better by enough to take your customers. There is no right answer. VC money sometimes is the best answer - but many people who reaching for VC money when their better long term answer would be to grow slow.
    • wholinator2 2y ago
      See, this is the thing that I, as a non-founder, have trouble understanding. Presumably the product is started by an enthusiast, an enthusiast _for the product_. Is it just hard to maintain that level of enthusiasm over time? Is the sum of possible money just too desirable? If feels like we're on this unending treadmill towards constant enshittification of literally every single thing that I interact with on a daily basis. All of the apps on my phone eventually turn into shit piles, all of the business/work software I use is constantly moving towards bullshit, even the houses that I rent, the newer construction is noticeably shittier than the old houses. Wifi got better for a while but now appears to be backsliding to the point of maximum frustration that the user will take (while given no viable second choice). Obviously not all of these are founder centric things but they're all profit driven enterprises. Is it actually just not possible for a typical human to turn down excess profits and take pride in a project rather than a money machine? People seem to think these things used to be better, "no one takes pride in their work anymore", "everything is made to break", etc. What changed?
• cratermoon 2y ago
  > if you develop your product by following your analytics, you'll inevitably converge on something that just shoves content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase, because that's what the median user of any given service wants Except you're making the mistake of thinking these services are optimizing for their userbase. They are not. They are optimizing for revenue and profit growth, a very different target. More ads, cheaper and easier-to-product content, lower opex. They are converging to churning out the least offensive slop at the cheapest cost with the maximum revenue. None of the analytics are about what people using the product want, they are about making the most money and growing the fastest. Nothing would look like the services mentioned in the article if they listened to what the users really preferred.
• darkhorse222 2y ago
  That is exactly what is happening to Reddit. Made famous by its submitters and moderators. Business decision driven by metrics based on view counts because that sells ads. Let this be a lesson: metrics are not the only way to measure success. I worked at a company where metrics were viewed as a way to cut through dissonance and bias. Newflash: leaders should be opinionated and have visions that do not yet exist. They should be investors in their product and its culture. Metrics should play a role in that decision, but perhaps a tiny one. Because what metrics you choose, how you measure it, and most importantly, what is even measurable, have a tremendous impact on the effect of those metrics. You cannot paint by numbers.
  • feoren 2y ago
    You keep using the word "should", but what makes you think these business parasites aren't getting exactly what they want by making their products complete garbage? The CEO caste doesn't care about making good or unique products; they don't care about their users; they don't care about company culture; they don't care about their effects on society or the environment; they don't even care about the long-term financial success of their company. They only care about the immediate short-term gains that directly benefit them, and clearly paint-by-metric is a tried and true way of optimizing for that at the expense of everything else. If it rots the company from the inside out (or even society as a whole), who gives a shit? They just fly off and find a different company to parasitize. By the time our society is collapsing and our rivers are catching fire and our government is being overthrown and our oceans are boiling and our bodies are full of plastic and we can't even escape to another planet because of Kessler syndrome -- all due to their actions -- they'll be old. That will be their kids' problems, and we know the CEO caste fucking hates their own kids.
• mlhpdx 2y ago
  Honestly, I think it’s just simple imitation. Something is popular, folks are envious of it, they end up building something much like it. Doesn’t matter if it’s houses, logos, or user experiences – seems to be how things work.
• heisenbit 2y ago
  The short term data driven optimizations somehow erode the original product architecture and some of its value. I also think treating the consumer as static. Trick me one shame on you, trick me twice (admittedly I get tricked even more often to click on stuff) shame on me but eventually I learn and what worked turn into a constant irritating torn-off. These irritations accumulate. Good product management should strive to minimize such irritations but I guess we lost that with Jobs.
• setgree 2y ago
  "Shoving content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase" maximizes eyeball time which maximizes ad dollars. Netflix's financials are a bit more opaque but I think that's the key driver of the carcinisation story here, the thing for which "what the median user wants" is ultimately a proxy. Likewise, all social media converges on one model. Strava, which started out a weirder platform for serious athletes, is now is just an infinity scroll with DMs [0] I do however think that this is an important insight: > This isn't to say that most people are tasteless blobs; I think everyone is a connoisseur of something, it's just that for any given individual, that something probably isn't your product. A lot of these companies probably were founded by people who wanted to cater to connoisseurs, but something about the financials of SaaS companies makes scaling to the ad-maximizing format a kind of destiny. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/style/strava-messaging.htm https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/style/strava-messaging.ht...
  • donatj 2y ago
    > "Shoving content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase" maximizes eyeball time which maximizes ad dollars I mean that's not really the case for paid services without ads like Netflix. They lose money the more you watch. Ideally you'd continue to pay for the subscription but never watch anything.
    • mattnewton 2y ago
      The marginal cost to serve you more videos is real, but it’s negligible compared to the fixed costs or cost of people not re-subscribing. So I assume that people at Netflix were optimizing for usage/engagement just like the ad driven services as a proxy for subscribe rate.
      • agent281 2y ago
        I wonder how much the workforce plays into it. If you have a bunch of people who work at companies that are trying to maximize eyeballs then they shuffle around to different companies, are they going to adopt the goals of the new company? Or is their existing perspective and skills going to shape the new company? I imagine it's a bit of both. Given how big Google and Meta are and how much talent circulates among big tech companies, this might cause companies to lean a bit more heavily into the attention economy than they might otherwise need to. Also, attention is just easier to measure than satisfaction. Makes it easier to fall down that path.
• red_admiral 2y ago
  I get your point but I think the browser analogy is wrong. IE had something like 90% market share back in the day because it was bundled with the OS and cost $0. Chrome ate everyone's lunch because everyone was using google to search for stuff, and they could advertise their browser on their home page or together with their search results. They also took out ads, in some countries, on billboards, in newspapers and even in cinemas. I'm sure technical people talking to their families had a small effect (though wouldn't they recommend firefox, because FOSS?), but I think that pales in comparison to google being able to advertise chrome on their search page.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    Chrome also ate everybody's lunch because it's the default browser on the most common networked computing devices in the world (android phones).
  • Suppafly 2y ago
    >Chrome ate everyone's lunch because everyone was using google to search for stuff, and they could advertise their browser on their home page or together with their search results. That and it was such a better browsing experience. Firefox was not good compared to Chrome for years. I'm sure they are feature parity now, but for years the Chrome experience was significantly better.
    • tristor 2y ago
      > That and it was such a better browsing experience. Firefox was not good compared to Chrome for years. I'm sure they are feature parity now, but for years the Chrome experience was significantly better. As someone who lived through those days, that is just straight up not true. The only measurable advantage that Chrome had over Firefox was in Javascript performance, because V8 was superior to the JS engine built into Gecko before the SpiderMonkey project started. Chrome won off mindshare, not off technical superiority. Everyone /assumes/ technical superiority because it's Google, but that's just not accurate. At best, you could count in Chrome's favor their early support for "web standards", because most of those standards were invented at Google, stuck into Chrome, and then only afterwards standardized so that others could make use of them. While the Chrome team at Google has done good work and an immense amount of work, they didn't start from nothing, Blink is a derivative of WebKit and didn't even diverge with the fork until 2013. Webkit itself didn't exist until 2001, when it was forked by Apple from KHTML (developed by the KDE team as a community project). The story of Chrome is the story of "embrace, extend, extinguish" from the Microsoft playbook, done by an even more powerful and influential technology giant being played out. It is not the story of technological superiority, nor was there any strong technical reason why Google couldn't have contributed their work into the open without creating their own browser. Even with Chrome, other than the development of V8, they contributed all of their work back to WebKit until 2013 when they forked. No surprise that Google regularly makes changes in its applications which advantage Chrome, penalize competing browsers, and still advertise Chrome on the front page of google.com, the most valuable ad real estate that exists anywhere.
• parpfish 2y ago
  “Tyranny of the the marginal user” https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-marginal-user https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi...
• hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  What you are describing is explained beautifully in "The Tyranny of the Marginal User" essay that got a lot of commentary on HN previously, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509507. My favorite quote ("Marl" is the hypothetical name for the marginal user): > Marl’s tolerance for user interface complexity is zero. As far as you can tell he only has one working thumb, and the only thing that thumb can do is flick upwards in a repetitive, zombielike scrolling motion.
  • ludicrousdispla 2y ago
    a mouse could easily do that with just it's nose
  • mrandish 2y ago
    I missed that post the first time around... and it's great. Thanks for re-posting it.
• whiddershins 2y ago
  this is such a fantastic comment because it makes a charitable attempt to explain how data driven decisions go off the rails. and it matters because this seems to be an omnipresent phenomenon. everything everywhere seems driven by this unless someone with decision making power is executing a specific and conscious strategy that pushes back against it.
• wouldbecouldbe 2y ago
  The irony is that he argued for a faster horse and that’s what all his providers are doing. TikTok is the faster horse. What he really is asking for is a step out of the paradigm, although he argues for a romantic conservative product instead of an innovative product like Ford.
• toss1 2y ago
  Nice example, but not everything is like automobiles where probably not even one in 1000 people has ever been to a track day let alone actually raced a car, but sporty marques are desired. A very large portion of people actually cares about what they are searching for, and want the ability to ACTUALLY search and find that, with real parameters, not merely get some not-even-close stuff shoved onto their screen instead. That is NOT the serendipity of browsing the stacks in a great library. A great example of failure is Amazon. I run a small design & manufacturing business, and years ago started getting pestered by Amazon about "Amazon Business" trying to supply both office staples and parts to businesses. This was an area that had enormous potential. Yet, they have entirely failed. I've never bought a single item, and it has faded. Their primary competitor is McMaster-Carr [0] who does it right. Well-defined categories of everything, and highly specific search capabilities, at reasonable but not bargain prices. EVERYTHING you might search for is fully parameterized in every dimension and feature. Min/max/exact, width/depth/height/thread/diameter/material/containerType/etc./etc./etc. appropriate for each type of product. The key is McMaster DOES NOT WASTE MY TIME. I can go there, quickly find what I want or determine that they don't have it, and get on with my day. The smaller company that does it right is still beating the tech giant a decade later. Same for other similar suppliers who actually have a clue about what their customers really want. They continue to prevail over tech giants and VC-funded sites BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT STUPID. It would be nice if the tech/vc crowd would also stop being stupid. They started out not stupid, but they really lose the plot when they think a few extra eyeballs this week will really win in the long run. At least provide two modes, a strict and serious search and their new messy UI. But they are stupid and this will not happen. Enshittification rules the day. [0] https://www.mcmaster.com/ https://www.mcmaster.com/
  • HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
    [rant] The thing that really pissed me off about Amazon Business is that they bought Small Parts and killed it off. Small Parts was a tiny version of McMaster-Carr that specialized in fasteners, small diameter fluid handling, short sections of specialty materials, and in general, quality "small parts." If I bought directly from Small Parts, I knew I'd get exactly what I wanted. Ordering from Amazon Business? A complete crapshoot. Going to www.smallparts.com now just redirects to an Amazon 404 page! [/rant]
• sheepscreek 2y ago
  You’re way overestimating the effect an enthusiast has. Evangelism only goes far enough to introduce people to the thing. How often someone uses the thing depends entirely on its utility (usefulness). As long as Netflix was successfully reading the author’s mind, they were satisfied with the experience. However, Netflix assumed that they want to keep watching the same content, oblivious to the author’s desire to discover something entirely new. Netflix failed to meet the expectations of those seeking something entirely different. I can understand why Netflix made this change. They’ve replaced many shows with their own in-house productions. By doing so, they prevent users from searching for specific shows and then realizing that Netflix doesn’t have them. If this happens frequently, they risk losing customers. On the other hand, Spotify doesn’t face this issue. Therefore, I’m puzzled by why they’ve made it more challenging to explore content by categories. (Disclaimer: I don’t use Spotify, so my experience is based solely on author’s observations.)
• rightbyte 2y ago
  > This isn't to say that most people are tasteless blobs; I think everyone is a connoisseur of something, it's just that for any given individual, that something probably isn't your product. I think this is a great nuance that is often overlooked when discussing this.
• raincole 2y ago
  > Ferraris, Lamborghini I think the big difference is that nobody is going to pay $10m for a web service or browser.
• hinkley 2y ago
  Some people have claimed that pure A/B testing is an agent for enshittification, both on a quality and ethical dimension. And I can’t see how those people are particularly wrong. There are systems out there that can do AB/CD testing and those do a better job of finding pairs of changed that have compounding effects. You cannot A/B test your way from chocolate and peanut butter to cherry and vanilla. So we get to deal with tone deaf companies who feel their analytics are proving that customers either don’t know what they want or are lying about what they want. But that’s not something A/B testing can prove. It takes more sophisticated experiments than that.
  • dpc_01234 2y ago
    Worth giving a read: The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Z. Muller.
• safety1st 2y ago
  I think when you're a startup, you have to invest in all of these things - you want to hire some experts early on because they'll have insights that help you design a better product, and if your product appeals to experts it will be a PR win. But of course your goal is scale and distribution so you have to respect a certain lowest common denominator as well lest you become too niche. Once you become a bloated monopolist like the three companies you just mentioned, your distribution strategy is solved in other ways (like, you've done some bundling and some acquisitions, maybe pressured a few companies into exclusivity agreements and are probably breaking some anti-trust law or other but you have lawyers). Then you don't care about the experts, PR or niches anymore, and you serve up slop. When the analytics recommend slop you go with the analytics, when they don't you ignore them. None of this is to discount your insightful comment, just saying once you're big enough, your strategy is just doing tricky distribution deals, really (a fact no record executive would dispute).
• cs702 2y ago
  My takeaway: The Nash Equilibrium of streaming UIs is a TikTok experience. :-(
• Suppafly 2y ago
  >maybe that really is the most profitable way to run a tech business. That's the issue, it seems like it really is the most profitable way to do things. Everything sucks now because shooting brainrot and advertisements at our eyes and ears is more profitable than actually giving us what we want.
• ookblah 2y ago
  yeah except a lot of those companies almost went bankrupt trying to make those cars for enthusiasts and only for them. porsche and lambo didn't see the outsized success they have now (financially) until they started pumping out SUVs. hell, the purosangue was made precisely to capitalize on that boring market segment. i feel there's a little suvivorship bias at play here. i think the important thing is to not forget your enthusiasts perhaps, but a lot of these "successes" wouldn't even be around were it not for appealing to the greater masses. ofc some market segments fare better and you can build a business around enthusiasts.
• amarant 2y ago
  That's a very keen observation! It's probably profitable in a lot of cases to follow those metrics, shovelware content is cheaper to produce, and since the median user pays the same subscription fee as the enthusiast, you get better margins producing slop for the uncaring masses. You need enthusiast businesses owners to produce quality product. Damn, I never thought of this before, but it explains so much!
• NegativeLatency 2y ago
  Chrome leveraged Google's near monopoly on search to gain users
• synergy7 2y ago
  I think the second paragraph in the parent comment fits really well with mimetic theory and this René Girard quote: "Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires." This, however, doesn't mean that the current Netflix solution is the only one possible.
• mrandish 2y ago
  > you will probably add in some user analytics service, and use the insights from that analysis to inform future development. However, that analysis will aggregate its results over all your users, and won't pick out the enthusiasts, who will shape discourse and public opinion about your service. Consequently, your results will be dominated by people who don't really have an opinion, and just take whatever they're given. This is so spot on. I was a long-time serial entrepreneur who spent a couple decades across three successful startups discovering, shipping and growing new categories of tech products primarily for consumer, prosumer and hobbyists. Then I sold my last startup to a very large F500 silicon valley tech leader and ended up a senior product exec there. While there were a lot of positives like more mature engineering processes, testing and devops as a discipline, the exact issue you describe was a nightmare of product-damaging mistakes I called "analytics abuse." In my startups I valued having increasingly robust analytics over the years. In part because they helped increase my overall understanding of usage but mostly because they provoked good questions to explore. That exploration happened naturally because as the "product guy / founder" I never stopped spending a lot of time with our most passionate, opinionated, thought-leading customers. Over years of iteration I'd learned how to engage deeply and listen carefully to input from these customers. This involved interpreting, filtering and curating the mess of divergent personal preferences and pet feature ideas to tease out the more actionable product signals that could increase broad usage, adoption and passion around our products. I'd then bring those curated signals back to the product teams for evaluation and prioritization. At BigCo they were diligent about meeting with customers, in fact they had entire processes around it, but their rigorous structures and meeting agendas often got in the way of just directly engaging and actively listening. Worse, the customer meetings the more senior product decision makers actually attended in person were mostly with the highest revenue customers. Junior PMs (and sometimes new grads) were delegated to meeting with the broader base of customers and filing reports. Those reports were then aggregated by ever-helpful program managers into tables of data and, eventually, slides - losing all nuance and any ability to spot an emerging outlier signal and tug on that thread to see where it goes. I tried to convince everyone that we were missing important customer signals, especially from our smartest, most committed users. Being only one level removed from the CEO and quite credible based on prior success, I was definitely heard and most people agreed there was something being lost but no one could suggest a way to modify what we were doing that could scale across dozens of major products and hundreds of product managers, designers, execs and other stakeholders. In my experience, this general problem is why large companies, even the most well-run, successful ones full of smart people trying their best, end up gradually nerfing the deeper appeal in their own products. Frustratingly, almost every small, single step in that long slide pushes some short-term metric upward but the cumulative effect is the product loses another tiny piece of the soul that made our most evangelistic, thought-leading customers love the product and promote it widely. Ultimately, I ended up constantly arguing we should forego the uplift from some small, easy-to-prove, metric-chasing change to preserve some cumulative whole most people in the org weren't fully convinced even existed. It was exhausting. And there's no fighting the tide of people incentivized on narrow KPIs come bonus season. I'm sorry to report I never found a solution to this problem, despite my best efforts over several years. I think it's just fundamental. Eventually I just told friends, "It's a genetic problem that's, sadly, endemic to the breed" (the 'breed' being well-run, very large tech companies with the smartest product people HR can hire at sufficient scale). Even if I was anointed CEO, given the size of the product matrix, I could only have personally driven a handful of products. I do think codifying premises and principles from the CEO level can help but it still gets diluted as the number of products, people and processes scales.
• SergeAx 2y ago
  > Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as desirable cars ... primarily for their price tag. There are a lot of enthusiasts for money in the world, much more than for driving at 200 mph. > the change was driven by enthusiasts recommending the latest and greatest to their less-technically-inclined friends and family It was never about recommendations. MSIE and Chrome were (and are, but with Edge Browser instead of MSIE) shoved into consumers' throats by ads, marketing, bundled distribution and outrageous lies.
• krisoft 2y ago
  > very few people have any real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH I agree with that. > but Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as desirable cars I agree with that too. > because the people who are into cars like those marques. I think that is not true. I don’t care about cars. Never had one. Don’t even have a driving licence. The reason why i think Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are desirable cars is because they look cool, and they sound cool. They were designed to be like that. If i see one on the street i notice it. I couldn’t care less about the opinion of gearheads. If a car would come out looking like my grandpa’s skoda, but all the car lovers would love it I wouldn’t even hear about it. It is all about flashyness of the industrial design. And rarity of course.
  • throwaway290 2y ago
    By that logic if you start making rare cool looking sportcars they would be automatically desirable. I doubt that would happen. Unless gearheads give it "approval", no one would buy it and you will be out of business.
    • krisoft 2y ago
      > Unless gearheads give it "approval", no one would buy it and you will be out of business. There is a slight sifting of goalpost here. I was talking about being "understood as desirable cars". You are now talking about business success. They are not the same. Think of DeLorean. They are absolutely understood as desirable cars, and they very much went bankrupt. > By that logic if you start making rare cool looking sportcars they would be automatically desirable. Yep. I don't see anything problematic with that. I believe if you make a rare and cool looking sportcar people will recognise it as desirable. That's basically the definiton of "cool looking". If people (gearheads and regular folks alike) don't recognise it as desirable then you didn't made a cool looking car. Which part do you disagree with here? I'm just thinking how we could test it. Imagine a car hot-or-not site. One where users have to "pick" which car is looking better or more desirable. The ultimate test would be to mix a few fictional sport car looking cars there. One which is completely made up so the gearheads could not have possibly approved it already. Do you think people would rate these fictional cars less desirable just because they doesn't exist? If you think this is suitable to answer our disagreement we could set this experiment up.
• montagg 2y ago
  You’re talking both about tastemakers and the silent majority vs loud minority. I promise it is NOT always a good idea to follow the enthusiasts, because they are not at all like everyone else who uses your thing. Following them will skew your decisions—unless they are your entire customer base, so, have at it. This article imo is complaining about the effect of middle management product owners at large companies. There are two dynamics that both converge on enshittification: 1. These product managers (or product designers) are early in their careers and want to make a splash. They are given lower priority projects but try to break out by making them bigger, better, more non-horse-like. They over-design and over-complicate the solutions as a result, because they don’t yet know when the right solution is just a refinement of what’s tried and true. They are incentivized to do this because they want to break out of the mold. 2. The managers above them, or a layer or two above depending on company size, are risk AVERSE. They are tasked with delivering results regularly and consistently. If you have the innovation bug or are creative at this layer, you get moved onto projects where this is required, which is not most of them. Overcomplicated is fine sometimes with you but WEIRD is absolutely not okay (the stuff that actually could be innovative), and no one gets fired for following The Metrics. These two incentives clash to create overcomplicated but functionally poor products that aren’t helping anybody out. A healthy skepticism of complication and a healthy skepticism of engagement as the sole metric (or metrics in general) is necessary to make good shit. Sometimes it is actually understanding and using things as an enthusiast would, but you need to bring in an understanding of how the rest of your users are distinctly different from the enthusiasts, too. Using your thing yourself and actually following your own subtler feelings is what produces really useful innovation, slowly and surely over time.
• coldtea 2y ago
  >For any given thing or category of thing, a tiny minority of the human population will be enthusiasts of that thing, but those enthusiasts will have an outsize effect in determining everyone else's taste for that thing. I think that's a self-dellusion many tech enthusiasts have, that they're somehow trend-setters. And then the same enthusiasts say for the original iPod "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame", and see the masses jump to buy it, and themselves only catch up later. Or they see the masses never caring for their e.g. desktop Linux, whose mass dominance (not mere "works for me" or "have set it up for my elderly parents and they don't even know it's not Windows") would come "any day now" for the last 30 years... Trend-setters exist, but they're a different group than the "tiny minority" of enthusiasts. More like some musician paid to spot Beats headphones, or some cool dude sporting some gadget early on. >For example, very few people have any real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH, but Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as desirable cars, because the people who are into cars like those marques. A hell of a lot of people had a real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH, if they could have the chance. And even more admired Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches because of their design and elegance (and price, people aspire to luxury goods, even when they can't afford them), not because some sport-car afficionados said so. It's the same in other areas: the popular books, or comics, or movies, or music, etc. are rarely if ever what the "inner" crowd of each niche admires. Most people buy Reacher and such, not Finnegan's Wake. >So if you develop your product by following your analytics, you'll inevitably converge on something that just shoves content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase, because that's what the median user of any given service wants. More likely, if you want to keep and continue increasing your margins, and your stock price, you'll incrementally continue to shit all over your product trying to squeeze ever more money. Neither the "enthusiasts"/tech-savvy users NOR the "median user" wants Netflix to be the shit it has become, or Google search to be so fucked up, or ads and nags on Windows UI, and so on. They're just given those, and they accept them having no recourse. The moment there's a better recourse, they jump to it (like IE -> Firefox -> Chrome, or BS early search engines -> Altavista -> Google).
• greenie_beans 2y ago
  this reminds me of american politics
• mystified5016 2y ago
  This is exactly the situation unfolding with JetBrains right now. They've lost all touch with their professional enthusiast core and have gone hell-bent on acquiring new users at the cost of alienating a big chunk of their core. I don't think it's going to go well for them, they don't have the chops to compete with Microsoft like they're presently trying to do.
• raxxorraxor 2y ago
  Just for protocol: In your example the peasant rabble recommend Chrome, while the enthusiasts with deep technical knowledge, broad perspective, wisdom, charm and good looks recommended Firefox.