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Inelastic demand lets you screw users in all kinds of creative ways. Also see: craigslist, crappy dating sites, and news.yc.
by seiji 14y ago
Inelastic demand lets you screw users in all kinds of creative ways. Also see: craigslist, crappy dating sites, and news.yc.
- powrtoch 14y agoWhat are the creative ways in which HN screws us?
- mdanger 14y agoI think the parent is making a comment about the news.yc iOS app, not HN itself?
- ceejayoz 14y agoIt's not very "creative", but the site is pretty awful on an iPhone. You have to zoom in an order of magnitude to be able to click up/downvote, and the layout doesn't shrink to fit the smaller screen at all.
- shalmanese 14y ago"Unknown or expired link"
- dreamdu5t 14y agoFacebook has no demand, it's free. There's no way to establish supply/demand without a price.
- seiji 14y agoThe cost of this demand type is attention. People will keep paying attention because they are invested personally (or they believe other people are invested personally and they want access to the peoplemarket). You can measure the elasticity by adding anything detracting from user experience (i.e. wasting your user's time when you could automate solutions (e.g. cragislist spam apartment listings you spend 20 hours sorting through manually) or speed up your site (e.g. social website slowness/downtime/high variance in page load times)). You've found some elastic jumps when users start leaving because you're wasting more and more of their time. People only have so many minutes of focusable attention every day. It's precious and irreplaceable. Don't waste your user's limiting waking attention with errors, manual aggregations, confusions, slowness, or "oops this failed try again and it may work or it may not work and you'll have to try again and it still won't work."