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.

> Ideally you'd continue to pay for the subscription but never watch anything.

I think that’s Netflix’s actual goal: deliver nothing anyone wants to watch, but keep on promising the possibility of something one might want to watch in the future.

Which reminds me, we really need to cancel our subscriptions.

> Which reminds me, we really need to cancel our subscriptions.

A subscription service to cancel and renew your subscriptions. And stretch goal: annually renegotiate your utility bill so it doesn't 4-10X in cost each winter (for those that live in states that can do that).

That's pretty much Rocket Money

https://www.rocketmoney.com/

Does it actually work?

In a limited sense, yes.

But in spirit, you would probably only describe it as truly "working" (in the sense of accomplishing its claimed purpose) if as soon as it ran out of things to suggest cancelling, it suggested cancelling itself. Which it doesn't. So no.

Same as a dating site/app — a dating system truly designed in spirit to accomplish its claimed purpose, would seek to minimize the time anyone spends using the app before uninstalling it. And no such site/app exists. (Although it could — as this is basically the business model of a professional matchmaker, where you pay a large lump sum up-front and then they're beholden to do unbounded work to find you a happy relationship. So they seek to minimize how much of their time you spend, by finding you that happy relationship ASAP.)

The professional matchmaker angle as a contrast is fascinating. The subscription model not only removes the incentive to provide quality quickly -- it reverses it. Doing a worse job is encouraged if you can leverage that to convince people that the future (which is only available by continuing your subscription) is worth waiting for. It's also more attractive because it has smaller up-front costs for the consumer.

It would be an interesting world if we outlawed auto-renewal for services that you need to actively use in order to get any value from them. When you're paying for Netflix, you aren't paying to watch movies, you're paying for /access/ to movies you can watch. The flip side is that the maximum potential service quality would decrease if revenue decreases -- which is also why ad-supported services prevail. If all players are subject to the same rules, that would either end up as a decrease in licensing costs or a focus on quality content over quantity. If they aren't producing exclusive content, they are beholden to the quality of the market. Either way, that should encourage quality content to be made over saturating the market with content.

Unfortunately, pipe dreams will remain pipe dreams.