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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

People don't directly care about performance and reliability, but it does affect their behavior.

Back in the day at reddit, for example, we could see an uplift in usage when we made the pages faster, there was nearly a direct correlation.

At Netflix we spent a lot of effort on reliability because every time we had a major outage, there was a dropoff in subscriptions with the cohort that had been affected.

And I've heard similar from other people in the reliability space -- that there is no direct impact on retention from availability issues, but you can see an effect in the long term.

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What's the difference between caring and affecting behavior? If people cancel their subscriptions after a major outage, wouldn't it be reasonable to interpret that some of them cared about performance and reliability?

I know I care. If I pay for something and it sucks, I stop paying for it because it's not up to my expectations.

I wrote it poorly and can't edit now, but what I meant was they cancelled 3-6 months down the line at a higher rate than those that didn't experience the outage.

So they didn't cancel right after, but it does appear to affect their overall view of the service.

I think people do care about these things, but they don't always know what it is, precisely, they're caring about. They just know that the thing they have is disappointing.

The problem for the company is the people just silently leave. They don’t cry they don’t complain they just go away.

That’s what kills companies.

100% work at another big-ish tech company on the networking stack and every time we decrease latency, we usually see an increase in traffic as more page loads succeed. It's still quite hard to make the case to PMs and business leaders that there's more latent demand left for our product at lower latency levels, but it's also hard to quantify that extra traffic into revenue vs costs of latency decreasing.

These features always matter, but they matter the most when you have competition. When the other guys’ retention problems become your selling point, you are making money off of them.

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