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But what if I want a faster horse?

(rakhim.exotext.com)
1525 points saeedesmaili | 3 comments | 11 Apr 25 11:39 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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cjs_ac ◴[11 Apr 25 12:22 UTC] 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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setgree ◴[11 Apr 25 14:12 UTC] No.43654022[source]▶
"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...

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donatj ◴[11 Apr 25 14:35 UTC] No.43654262[source]▶
> "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.

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mattnewton ◴[11 Apr 25 14:37 UTC] No.43654296[source]▶
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.
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crazygringo ◴[11 Apr 25 17:09 UTC] No.43656097[source]▶
This is the correct answer.

The more you watch, the less likely you are to unsubscribe.

If you haven't watched a streamer in a couple of months, that's the first thing you'll cancel when you glance at your credit card statement.

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1. bluGill ◴[11 Apr 25 18:53 UTC] No.43657175[source]▶
Netflix could probably get enough goodwill by just automatically not charging people who didn't use their service at all as to be worth it. No hassle, we just keep rolling your subscription over until you watch something again (of course they make interest in the month you paid but didn't use services - that $0.05 should pay for the email and other infrastructure costs needed for a customer that doesn't even use the service). The real benefit of this is when someone does watch something there is no hassle - they are already subscribed and so they don't even think about should the re subscribe.

Of course with their ad supported tier they probably don't agree.

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2. crazygringo ◴[11 Apr 25 20:34 UTC] No.43658217[source]▶
I think they already remind you after a year of inactivity, and automatically cancel your plan after 2 years of inactivity.

But they're a business, so obviously they want you to use it and pay for it.

3. NoMoreNicksLeft ◴[11 Apr 25 22:27 UTC] No.43659371[source]▶
>Netflix could probably get enough goodwill by just automatically not charging people who didn't use their service at all as to be worth it.

Is there a circumstance that could cause their stock price to drop to $0 more quickly?