Making things people want vs. making things that alter thinking | Hacker News Reader

Making things people want vs. making things that alter thinking

rohan.ga

58 pointsocean_moist57 comments

> Reddit changed the way people interacted online and how online content was aggregated, people often append “reddit” to their google results to get higher quality content.

This was not a good thing, and not intentional but a consequence of the SEO-driven commercialization of the web, walled gardens and such. Reddit didn't set out to 'change how online content is aggregated'. It's not necessarily higher quality content than before either, just the largest human place left.

Not being in the US, can someone explain to me what did Doordash change about delivery? I all see is these crazy chats with drivers when food goes missing.

Previously delivery drivers were hired for and delivery offered on a per restaurant basis. We had couriers for general delivery but they were niche specialty providers. Doordash separated delivery from the restaurants and provided a means of tapping into their market. See also Instacart.

What is new about it though? This model is common, Takeaway.com (EU) was founded in the year 2000.

IIRC Instacart's disruptive idea was to deliver groceries, not restaurant orders, they pivoted later to survive.

Doordash's disruptive idea was to entirely capture the experience of ordering from the restaurants, up to and including registering websites for the restaurants and pretending like they had an agreement with each restaurant on their listing. At one point if you placed a Doordash order there were some restaurants they would just place a call to and then have a driver pick up from there like it was an individual order.

This is precisely what Takeaway / Thuisbezorgd does, except in a fully legal way. It's also how online delivery services operate in South America, most small restaurants never had a website or their own delivery (except for pizza places). Maybe it was disruptive in the context of the USA.

Or, maybe it comes down to simply having a ton of funding to operate at a loss until you clear out the entire market for yourself? Similar to what Uber did.

The original post I replied asked specifically about the US. Living primarily in the US I've never heard of takeaway.com though from living in the UK the lingo is familiar.

You're not wrong that a lot of company growth is fueled by VCs subsidizing to try and create effective monopoly. So too that many companies use legal gray areas (or not so gray) to try and further bolster competitive advantage.

Before searching extra results on reddit, we had yahoo LOL

Also I would honestly rather add "type:forum" to my searches and search all forums rather than just Reddit. The problem is that Google doesn't seem to provide a way to do this.

I do an equivalent thing in Kagi using lenses. Although I have to manually define which forums to include.

I don't agree with the conclusion put forward in the article. I'm reminded of my time trying to get into Urbit many years ago or DAPs. That certainly require me to think differently about things but that didn't make me, or many other people, want them. It might be a necessary pre-condition for stickiness but it certainly isn't equivalent. Barriers to adoption lock people out and, once they have been overcome, lock people in.

I think that's just more that Urbit isn't a good (or at least mature) product.

I always remember this phrase whenever this topic comes up. "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses" - Henry Ford.

Not to be pedantic, but there isn’t any evidence he ever actually said that. It’s also used as justification for all sorts of bad business decisions that could have been solved with a tiny bit of research first.

Allegedly he did say “If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own”, though.

Which says the exact same thing. You can't just ask someone. You have to understand them.

FWIW, I feel this quote is often misinterpreted -- too many people take it to mean "If my audience thinks I'm building the wrong thing that's ok -- I must hold my conviction and they'll thank me later". The reality is that any new product is a balance between building something familiar, fulfilling explicit customer desires, and improving in ways they didn't even expect. All of these are important. Maybe we can balance out the Henry Ford quote with this one from Peter Theil:

"No one can predict the future exactly, but we know two things: it's going to be different, and it must be rooted in today's world."

You may still be misinterpreting it (or, more likely, I am misinterpreting you!). The "faster horse" is exactly what the customer wants. It it is what you need to provide. The trouble is that people don't have the words to properly describe what they want (It doesn't yet exist. It cannot be fully described using existing language!), so you cannot take what they say literally. You have to really dig in and truly understand them and what they are trying to say.

I think I more or less agree with you. But I feel the quote itself is often misinterpreted to mean “I can ignore my users’ concerns, because I know better”.

True enough. Ironic that a quote that is trying to basically say "Don't read into things literally, understand what is actually being said" is oft taken only literally.

> "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses" - Henry Ford

Except that's exactly what people wanted.

Humans settled for combustion engines with all the attendant downsides because it is not possible make a faster horse (or human).

A stable-less horse, maybe. The reduced maintenance requirements is the car's primary appeal.

But you are right that a faster horse is exactly what they wanted – just not literally. The words they had to describe what they actually wanted hadn't been invented yet, so they had to fumble around with what was at their disposal.

Which, of course, is the point of the quote: Don't take what people say at face value. Understand what they actually mean.

Why are all the examples so bad? Uber and AirBnb are just “disrupt regulation” businesses.

> OpenAI completely shifted how people think about intelligence and the effects of AI on society.

AI has been a tech-utopian dream (or dystopian) dream/nighmare for over half a century. “We’ll get there eventually/it’s just a matter of time.” And people say the same thing for literally any current flaw in the current machine learning soups today.

Do you actually believe that this current wave of is no different than previous waves?

It is different. I was addressing the “shifted how people think about intelligence”. AI Supremacy has been an idea and a meme for a long-ass time.

Ah yes - Uber, Doordash, and AirBNB. Famously profitable, right? Definitely not companies that currently and have always hemorrhaged money in order to drive out the existing competition and establish a dominant market share. Users fell in love with the product because it changed the way they think, not because it was artificially subsidized to be the cheapest available option until the legacy industry could no longer compete with it.

There may be some insight to be gained with the concept in the essay, but the examples aren't great.

I chose Uber because the concept of getting into a strangers car was the first shift of thinking a startup did that came to mind.

The rest I chose are examples from YC as they are the ones with phrase “Make something people want”.

I think if I spent some more time I could have came up with better ones.

People have been getting into taxis for over a hundred years. Uber is just a slightly sketchy taxi service. What shift of thinking is involved?

Yes, plenty of good examples.

Spotify and Netflix changed the way people think about intellectual property and how content is accessed.

Tinder changed the way people thought about meeting partners.

I agree with the principle of paradigm shifting. But many of these modern examples are just exploring the concept of bypassing regulations in a regulated space (Uber, Airbnb, etc.)

I'm surprised to see how much negativity is being posted here, but I do think a better way of thinking about this is "Make things people want AND things that alter thinking" rather than VS.

With Uber as the example, people wanted to be able to get around easier, AND their thinking was changed as to how they would do that.

Netflix, people wanted to easy access to movies, AND netflix changed how they thought about that. Not "oh a blockbuster is close by", but rather, I'll order by mail and always have something ready to go, and then I'll just stream it.

Tesla, people wanted high performance cars, AND Tesla changed how they think about electric cars. They're no longer elevated golf carts.

At our company AffectableSleep.com, people think they want more sleep time, but we're (trying to) change peoples thinking to ensuring they get optimal sleep recovery in the time they do have.

These unicorns examples are easy to use and understand, it’s hard to imagine in practice where most apps won’t have the same impact but still have similar qualities, he should have found a few of those examples

Yeahhhhh plus did any of those really change “how people think”? I was expecting some epistemology content, not just “if you’re Uber-successful (heh) you can create a new sub market”. Like,

  For Uber, people wanted an easier way to get around, but, at the same time, people’s thinking shifted away from “why would I want to get into a strangers car?”

That’s literally describing taxis. By what metric would taxi drivers not be strangers?

  AirBnb shifted thinking away from “why would I let strangers into my house?”.

Couch surfing is a long-running practice that Airbnb monetized. Plus, y’know, BnBs exist.

  Reddit changed the way people interacted online and how online content was aggregated, people often append “reddit” to their google results to get higher quality content.

This isn’t really saying anything in the first place. Forums are older than reddit, to say the least, and the “Reddit + Google” effect is an overblown cliche at this point IMHO.

  DoorDash changed the way people think about takeout and how restaurants monetize their food.

I’d maaaaybe give DD and GH “popularized”, maybe. But “changed how people think about takeout” seems unsupported.

  OpenAI completely shifted how people think about intelligence and the effects of AI on society.

They invented the first usable chatbot. That’s not “changing how people think” in any intentional way, that’s just first-mover advantage. The first car, the first passenger plane, and the first vaccine had similar effects, not because of any business strategy but just because those technologies turned out the useful.

I agree with you, but just wanted to point out that the author is (from what I gather) a teenager, so perhaps a degree of naivete is expected in his writing.

Well then I should add: this is overall well written from a rhetorical standpoint, and thought provoking -- even if I disagreed. Thanks for posting, OP :). Hope to see more, at the least so I can disagree again!

You already lost if your mental model to create something is based on a VC company's marketing outreach or blogger dude's publicity outreach attempt.

If your mental model does not include some form of making something people want and you are trying to create a startup which has the sole goal of getting people to use and pay for your product, I think you would have a hard time being successful.

This is confusing causation and correlation. The most influential startups change the way people think because their offering was so innovative. The change in perception is a effect of success. Why should changing the way someone thinks be prioritized over a product offering?

> Reddit changed the way people interacted online and how online content was aggregated, people often append “reddit” to their google results to get higher quality content.

Nah. People already interacted that way back in the Usenet days. And we used Usenet search engines to get results from it specifically.

Reddit's only claim to fame is that happened to be there at the moment Digg became unusable.

> Reddit's only claim to fame is that happened to be there at the moment Digg became unusable.

And up until now every competing Reddit-type effort attracted the wrong crowds.

There may be an opportunity for a new Reddit now that Reddit at scale attracts super young users that aren't as interested in long form discourse. Reddit's desire for growth has alienated a lot of high signal contributors.

There's huge opportunity here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Infographics/comments/1fb8xll/most_...

I hope we return back to internet forums. There are still internet forums that are thriving today and perhaps even growing, but it is my understanding that forums has largely died away.

They're way more niche now than ever before.

I have a forum for classic nes games and collecting, woodworking, and woodworking tools.

It's people who I can name, and in the case of old iron, have met in person at an actual get together.

They're still out there, but hidden. And quiet.

I miss forums too, and I blame the "mobile revolution" for their demise.

Forums are ideal for long-form discussion in text-format. But they don't really work well on mobile devices where typing is cumbersome and reading a lot of text to catch up on a thread isn't all that enjoyable.

And you remember when forums were trying to be mobile friendly by introducing things like infinite scroll? It just didn't work. Meanwhile "the masses" were flocking to sites like Twitter where content was delivered in short bites and they could doom scroll until they got bored.

Forums still exist they are just niche now and it's harder to attract a user-base when so many people prefer to use social media for their "discussions" because that is better suited to small talk on a smart phone.

Usenet was used by about almost exclusively people with an IT or engineering background.

Reddit is used by a far wider and larger audience, both relatively and absolutely.

Sure, which is also approximately representative of who was using the internet in general at the time, but we're not about to credit Reddit with bringing the internet to the masses.

Usenet was widely used by the IT adjacent as well. For example, by non-technical people at companies where Usenet was widely used.

It's lack of use by non-technical people was likely due to lack of exposure and/or access rather than lack of appeal.

You are grossly overestimating or misremembering how user friendly usenet was for anyone who doesn't know what a server or port is

"Tech-adjacent" is the group of people who have a tech to do all that stuff for them.

It's adoption failed because you needed understanding of underlying protocols in order to get it to work

A literal monkey could post on Reddit.

That's the difference and that's why usenet never got widespread adoption

Huh? You just needed to use a usenet app, some of which were quite easy to use.

This argument of "Usenet vs Reddit" has a kind of anachronistic feel to it. There was over a decade between Usenet being passé and Reddit gaining popularity. Alternatives to a Reddit at the time of its emergence were other relatively new "social bookmarking" sites like Digg and del.icio.us, and the old standby forums mostly running PHPBB and vBulletin. I came of (internet) age during this time in the early 2000s and never used Usenet; nobody I know did, but we had online communities before Reddit. Many of them even had point systems and badges and other little gamifiction elements that were often idiosyncratic and tailored to the specific community.

i attribute my last bootstrap failure to this dynamic, where instead of making something someone wanted, I made something I thought other people should do becaise I knew the domain so deeply. I tell my MBA and ivy league friends that I am quite sure my education is more expensive than theirs as a result.

to anyone developing a security product I would say that nobody wants security, they want what the security gets them. this probably generalizes to nobody wants your product, they want what your product gets them, and if you don't understand what that is, there is no PMF. however, it's also better to take advice from people who win instead of those who can over articulate their failures, so caveat emptor, ymmv, etc.

> however, it's also better to take advice from people who win instead of those who can over articulate their failures

I didn't even articulate it well. Nobody wants a car, they want what the car gets them? It works even for a house or a beer

pretty much. houses are about location and cars are personal parade floats. the beer you choose signals experience and class alignment.

finding someone who wants something is the precursor to making something someone wants. then make the thing that helps them become.

From the article:

"tl;dr: making things people want and making things that alter thinking are isomorphic to each other"

I like the post (and think it goes well with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41522551) but I do not think "isomorphic" is the right word.

I agree, it’s a bit of stretch.

In my mind the mapping and inverse mapping were defined in these two paragraphs:

“I think altering thinking at scale requires people wanting that thing, otherwise you wouldn’t get network effects and scaling would be impossible.

Also, I think that making something people wants requires altering the way they think. When you make something new you ask people to reconsider their existing habits and first principles. This mental shift, however small, is what leads to mass adoption and users falling in love with your product.”

It sounds like they want to say they are synonymous. Isomorphic implies that each category has the same[1] internal structure. Given that the author doesn't spend much time developing the ontology of want nor the ontology of thought, it's hard to make an isomorphic connection between the two realms.

For me a stronger essay would be to say, "Give people a reason to change their minds," or "Strong products give people a reason to change their minds." Connecting "I would never get into someone else's car," or "I would never let strangers stay in my home," to reasons why we would change our mind on those topics, is a better conceptual framework for creating things people want.

We can identify loads of things we wouldn't do, and conceive of ideas that might make people change their minds. Even better, we can find pairs of things that people want and the assumptions they have that are preventing them from getting what they want, and create a product that connects the two. Either way, that's not exactly the author's essay.

1. Or for the sake of the grace, similar internal structure.

It implies that for every thing people want there's a corresponding change to the way they think.

There's a subset where that's true, but "Iso" is a stronger sort of morphism than what we have here. It must preserve structure everywhere to be an isomorphism.

Yeah, perhaps I don’t want to use isomorphic as it sort of implies a universal quantifier. I think the relationship is weaker than isomorphism in retrospect.

EDIT: On the other hand, all external stimuli changes the way we think, we are meaning making machines. Where there is something we try and make meaning of it.

I think scale matters in terms of things impact on our thinking, but fundamentally the argument could be made that for all things people want there are changes in the way they think.

Maybe clarifying “novel things” people want would be clearer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com