But what if I want a faster horse?

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.

"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.ht...

> "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.

Ads are embedded into the media Netflix sells. See almost any car chase scene, either wholly unnecessary or unnecessarily long to advertise the car brand, many times with the actors’ speaking lines solely to advertise the car.

Even critically acclaimed shows like Slow Horses from a supposedly prestige media seller like Apple has scenes where you watch actors put on AirPods Max headphones (obviously with no relevance to the plot).

More accurate is “streaming without discrete ad breaks.”

> More accurate is “streaming without discrete ad breaks.”

Yes, or as people call it: "ad-free". We all know what is meant by that phrase, being pedantic about "well actually there are ads regardless" doesn't make communication clearer.

The point is to bring the knowledge to people that the advertising is incorporated into the product. Lots of people don’t know the extra long car chase scene isn’t due to the director’s artistic preference, but rather economic preference, at the viewer’s expense.

There is a clear conflict of interest that can only be addressed by buyers being knowledgeable.

This is an important point. Readers should remember that what's obvious to them is not necessarily something "everyone knows" until it's pointed out. Personally I will say that when I first starting consuming movies at around age 20 I was not conscious of this dynamic, until I read about product placement in movies and then suddenly I started noticing it. Especially when a car chase scene goes into slow motion at just the moment that the camera gets a closeup of the tires and you can read the brand name...