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But what if I want a faster horse?

(rakhim.exotext.com)
1525 points saeedesmaili | 5 comments | 11 Apr 25 11:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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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krisoft ◴[11 Apr 25 19:00 UTC] No.43657261[source]▶
> very few people have any real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH

I agree with that.

> but Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as desirable cars

I agree with that too.

> because the people who are into cars like those marques.

I think that is not true. I don’t care about cars. Never had one. Don’t even have a driving licence.

The reason why i think Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are desirable cars is because they look cool, and they sound cool. They were designed to be like that. If i see one on the street i notice it. I couldn’t care less about the opinion of gearheads. If a car would come out looking like my grandpa’s skoda, but all the car lovers would love it I wouldn’t even hear about it.

It is all about flashyness of the industrial design. And rarity of course.

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1. throwaway290 ◴[12 Apr 25 05:29 UTC] No.43661595[source]▶
By that logic if you start making rare cool looking sportcars they would be automatically desirable. I doubt that would happen. Unless gearheads give it "approval", no one would buy it and you will be out of business.
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2. krisoft ◴[12 Apr 25 21:55 UTC] No.43668215[source]▶
> Unless gearheads give it "approval", no one would buy it and you will be out of business.

There is a slight sifting of goalpost here. I was talking about being "understood as desirable cars". You are now talking about business success. They are not the same. Think of DeLorean. They are absolutely understood as desirable cars, and they very much went bankrupt.

> By that logic if you start making rare cool looking sportcars they would be automatically desirable.

Yep. I don't see anything problematic with that. I believe if you make a rare and cool looking sportcar people will recognise it as desirable. That's basically the definiton of "cool looking". If people (gearheads and regular folks alike) don't recognise it as desirable then you didn't made a cool looking car.

Which part do you disagree with here? I'm just thinking how we could test it. Imagine a car hot-or-not site. One where users have to "pick" which car is looking better or more desirable. The ultimate test would be to mix a few fictional sport car looking cars there. One which is completely made up so the gearheads could not have possibly approved it already. Do you think people would rate these fictional cars less desirable just because they doesn't exist? If you think this is suitable to answer our disagreement we could set this experiment up.

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3. throwaway290 ◴[13 Apr 25 02:07 UTC] No.43669465[source]▶
> I was talking about being "understood as desirable cars". You are now talking about business success. They are not the same.

I mean to be widely desirable car requires some business success first.

> Do you think people would rate these fictional cars less desirable just because they doesn't exist?

Yes. You must be a rare carhead to judge the whole thing from just the outside and engine sound. The rest of normal people know they cannot and use reputation as proxy. I don't think it needs proving..,

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4. krisoft ◴[13 Apr 25 12:07 UTC] No.43672170{3}[source]▶
> You must be a rare carhead...

Which I'm not. This is my point. I do not know of the reputation of Porsche. If you tell me they are shitty cars I would shrug and believe you. I do not even recognise the brand of a car. I see flashy car, bright colours, fast looking body, deep bone-shaking engine sound and I conclude "wow, that's a cool car". This is based on how it sounds and looks. Since I don't know anything about the reputation of the car it cannot be based on that.

If you are a carhead maybe you are mistaken about how regular people judge these things.

> I don't think it needs proving..,

Sounds like we disagree on how or why regular, not vehicle enthusiast, people recognise a car to be desirable. I proposed a test how we can figure out which one of ours theory is right. Do you agree in principle if people were to rate fictional cars as highly desirable that would show that reputation of the manufacturer is not what factors into that decision?

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5. throwaway290 ◴[13 Apr 25 17:57 UTC] No.43674574{4}[source]▶
I'm not a carhead and most of us use brands to tell if it's good or not. If unknown brand car I see once looks cute that means literally nothing without extra information.

But if I see the same unknown brand car 10x in a day and then I see it in a videogame etc. and it's expensive so many carheads spend a bunch of money on it = endorsement, it's no longer unknown brand.

Same for everything, phones, cameras, whatever. You gotta be discerning to appreciate beyond the brand and most people are not.

If I see a cute car I check what's the brand, how much it costs etc and THEN I can think "yeah I want this cool looking car". I don't think anyone would use just cute shape of a car seen once as a justification for buying it.

Fast body? That means you must be a carhead. How do I know it's a fast body? Why would I even need a fast body?