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1525 points saeedesmaili | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0.642s | source
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cjs_ac ◴[] No.43652999[source]
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. 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.

If you're designing a consumer-oriented web service like Netflix or Spotify or Instagram, 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.

Think about web browsers. The first popular browser was Netscape Navigator; then, Internet Explorer came onto the scene. Mozilla Firefox clawed back a fair chunk of market share, and then Google Chrome came along and ate everyone's lunch. 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.

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. (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.) But who knows - maybe that really is the most profitable way to run a tech business.

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chasd00 ◴[] No.43653326[source]
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.
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1. temp0826 ◴[] No.43654318[source]
I'm convinced expensive watches are exclusively used as a vehicle for money laundering
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2. ◴[] No.43655982[source]
3. bluecalm ◴[] No.43658380[source]
My friend does some trades in watch market as he gets access to limited editions from time to time (if you know right people in dealerships you can sometimes buy a watch out of line if the original "subscribed" buyer doesn't show up). There are quite a few people who want to buy an expensive watch or two to show off on their social media. People just really like shiny status symbols.
4. srveale ◴[] No.43659216[source]
Shady business, potentially, but you might be underestimating how much some guys really, really need to have the most expensive watch in their friend group.