Comment by digitalsushi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by digitalsushi | Hacker News Reader

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Our attention is the only valuable thing left. Browsers run competing tech stacks and pile on and draw off a mass of blinking things trying to get the attention. It's a tiny little war happening in real time on our screens.

AI chat things are liquids held in vials, a thumb flick away from pouring into our favorite places online, changing them irrevocably. Will our attention in these places (reddit, here, et al) remain high when most of the people we're talking with are algorithmic?

Media companies create new shows and pull them away more quickly than we can finish consuming them, as realtime engagement metrics quickly show their bosses which must be most profitable, most popular, most attention grabbing.

It makes a good case for going back: watching shows from decades earlier, that have a beginning middle and end. Dropping social media time for books. And the missing analogue, how to give up on google searches because they too, are at a parity of value with their offering and their attention stealing properties.

I'm just an angry person shaking his fist at the sky from an armchair. I love these threads because I always come away with a new perspective.

> Our attention is the only valuable thing left. Browsers run competing tech stacks and pile on and draw off a mass of blinking things trying to get the attention. It's a tiny little war happening in real time on our screens.

This seems fantastically counter-productive though. If you want to capture someone's attention, you've got to remove the distractions and clean up your presentation. The effort seems misplaced to focus entirely on drawing attention at the expense of maintaining it.

That's if you want to capture someone's focus, not their attention.

If you capture their focus, are you not also capturing their attention?

Yes, but not necessarily the other way around.

I'm not saying one is necessarily better than the other, but I think the 2 different UIs are serving 2 different goals. Focus requires commitment at some level, and I don't think most websites are predicated on the notion that the average user is committed, at least initially. Maybe once you make a sale to them and they get access to your product you can safely prioritize focus because you now have that commitment.

I think engineers generally are above average on the skill of summoning focus, as you kind of need it in order to perform math, analysis, and logic.

It’s more about selling someone’s attention than holding it. The best possible outcome for both websites and Google is for a user to click on on a website from search and then immediately click on an ad. To the extent you find the site useful and don’t need what’s being advertised, that’s a fail for both of them.

More like they monetise it at the expense of maintaining it.

Media companies pulling shows so quickly makes me sad. It's one of those cases where I think they constantly misread the data. "People don't watch shows with a long story arc as they come out, so we should cancel them" is really "people don't trust us to continue shows with a long story arc until a good stopping place, so they don't want to invest the time in starting new ones"

Part of it is they don't want to renegotiate pay with the cast of a successful show so they cut them off before that becomes an issue.

That's usually solved by multi-year initial contacts.

> Our attention is the only valuable thing left.

That's...just not true, though.

You know what's still more valuable than our attention? Our money.

The only reason they want our attention is to get our money.

A big part of the problem is how many people simply don't have enough money, due to the stagnation of real wages and the increase in the cost of housing, health care, and higher education, among other things. If everyone had a reasonable amount of disposable income, as is true in a healthy society/economy, it would be much, much more viable for many websites and apps to charge for their usage, rather than being ad-supported.

Nah, that's not true. People just don't like to spend money, especially when they are rich.

Most people in the US love spending money. It's considered a recreational activity.

Hmmh, so why do so many people complain about paying for all the different streaming services like Disney plus, Netflix, Amazon prime, etc.? It's really peanuts compared to the value delivered.

"Value" is a very personal thing, though. You may find something is great value for money, and others may not, and neither is wrong.

Personally, I don't find that the streaming services are good value. I don't complain about it, though. I just don't subscribe to them.

Also, buying services doesn't satisfy the "shopping as a recreational activity" itch. A big part of the recreation is the actual shopping, and coming home with physical stuff.

That's true. And that's why people having enough money is not an alternative solution to software / digital content financed by ads.

Eh it was great value when it was just Netflix or just two services but now I feel like there's often only 0-1 shows on a given platform that I'm interested in at any one time. It isn't "good value" to pay $15+ a month each for Netflix/Prime/Disney/HBO/Hulu/AppleTV and only use one or two of them in a given month. Because Prime Video is bundled with regular Amazon Prime I keep that active and activate and deactivate the others based on when they come out with seasons of shows I care to watch. I also think a lot of complaints are about the platforms increasingly making the experience worse like making me pay to remove ads when I'm already paying for the service, or what Netflix is pulling with their family plans.

About a decade ago I used to pay $45+ a month for a very basic cable package that contained mostly public stations and a few of the standard stations that you get a hotels, etc. At the same time my parents paid around $100+ a month for their cable package with a better channel selection.

So, to me, even paying $60-$80 for various streaming services that are all on-demand (which wasn't the case for the cable I used to have) is still an amazing deal.

Oh, and I don't have to sit through ads every 5 minutes.

I think it depends. All else being equal in terms of your daily commute, owning a big and expensive car is often seen as better than owning a more affordable smaller car.

If you consider "the value delivered" to be the totality of all the content on the platforms, then sure. But that's not actually valuable to most of the people subscribing, so it's ultimately a useless way of looking at it.

Any given person is only going to care about some small fraction of the media available for watching, and when that fraction is spread out across 6 different streaming services, the "value" they're getting from any single one of those is fairly small.

Furthermore, similar to what ldhough says, many of us remember when we could get basically all that content on Netflix, and we know perfectly well that a) the content providers could be making reasonable amounts of money through a streaming deal like that, and b) the reason they decided to launch their own service is one part insatiable desire for ever increasing profit, one part unrelenting crusade for absolute control over everything they own. Nowhere in there is "value to the customer".

There's a quote that I've seen go 'round a few times, to the effect of "the streaming services really need to remember that their entire value proposition is being slightly more convenient than piracy."

Seems to me the insatiable desire here is that of the customer for free or nearly free stuff. What is a reasonable amount of money? You know that Amazon spent $465 Million dollars on just one season of Lord of the rings, right?

Because the ones who enjoy paying for them do not complain so you believe the complainers are a majority.

> A big part of the problem is how many people simply don't have enough money

Sounds like money isn’t valuable as a target if it doesn’t exist.

But fwiw the scarcity of disposable income is why there is such an arms race with advertisers- they’re all chasing the same fleeting dollars across the internet.

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