Hacker News Reader

Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

> Replace "youtube videos" with whatever the company is trying to achieve.

Some counterpoints:

- Xerox knowingly didn't fix the problematic gear trains to guarantee periodic part changes, prioritizing money over "best copier possible".

- Ford didn't fix Pinto's fuel tank, prioritizing cost minimization over "best possible car in its class".

- Microsoft is did tons of shady things in its OS development history to prioritize domination over "best OS possible", sometimes actively degrading the good features and parts of its OS.

- Dyson's some batteries are notorious for killing themselves via firmware on slight cell imbalance instead of doing self-balancing. Dyson prioritize "steady income via killing good parts early" instead of "building the best vacuum possible".

- Many more electronic and electromechanical systems are engineered with short lives to prioritize "minimizing costs and maximizing profit" over "building the best X possible".

- Lastly, Boeing's doing all kinds of shady stuff (MCAS, doors, build quality, etc.) since they prioritize "maximize shareholder value" over "building the best planes possible".

- ...and there's Intel, but I think the idea is clear here.

View on HN

I think this is exactly the point that MrBeast is trying to make.

By being best YOUTUBE videos it means to focus on whatever appeals to the algorithm. It doesn't mean you are better informed, or better entertained, as long as the click-through-rate is great and the minutes people watch the video is maximized.

You could say the same thing is true for Xerox, for them the best doesn't necessary mean that they sell you the best most reliable copier, but the highest grossing product, with a guaranteed post-sale income.

And this is why we can't have nice things.

There was a blog post linked on HN a while ago, it was about their start up they ran many years ago. They got traction with clients and were a very "engineering focused" (or similar term) organization. Their code was rock solid.

It was all going great, until suddenly some new company showed up and started taking their customers. Their new competitor's software was a mess with all sorts of incomplete or pure vaporware features.... but they did get features out fast.

They got beat out by Salesforce...

We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things.

But most of the time, we as engineers don't pick the winners. Some C-Suite executive or middle manager, who isn't very technically inclined, picks the winners, and we as engineers are forced to make it work.

As I don't think a engineer has ever had the chance to choose a company's CRM, the CRM with better marketing would always win over the CRM with better engineering.

Question I would pose is, why should engineer have the decision on a new CRM?

They can provide input regarding e.g. maintainability, but majority of input would come from other stakeholders - users and business unit owning the customers whose relationship we want managed, ideally primarily. And it is somebodys job to take these inputs into collective whole.

It was a mind blowing exercise to me 15 years ago when I was telling my boss how horrible our current installation of some ERP software was, and be asked me what's the user perspective. They log in every day, run financial reports they need, and log out. The system was great from their perspective! They had even less concern for my perspective of poor architecture and suboptimal implementation, than I (at that point) had of their perspective and goals. Thank krishna I didn't make the decisions on the CRM :-)

Upthread, bayindirh posted half a dozen examples of financially-motivated decisions that were actively, deliberately hostile, sometimes fatal, to the customer. We're not just talking about good-enough fiddly details here.

>why should engineer have the decision on a new CRM

well there's the craftsman argument and then there's the broken windows argument.

the craftsman one if obvious: if you're in a devops/IT role and your job is to manage salesforce, then you should have some input in it as it'll affect you efficiency (aka the profitability of your company). A salesman shouldn't be buying tools for the carpenter without the carpenter's input.

the windoww argument is a bit more superficial but still a factor to consider. I may not be working on mainaining saleforce, but I will need to interface with it for logstics purposes. if it's so inefficient that it becomes a chore to track hours or update documentation or etc. it's going to leave a bunch of broken windows. You can still operate with a broken window, but that part of the building will be a place to avoid. You may even try to work around the CRM wherever possible. Which seems to lose the point of a CRM

> We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things.

We do generally want nice things, but we can't be experts in all the things. In markets where you have mostly responsible actors, that can work out fine. But absent effective regulation or other feedback mechanisms, in many markets an actor who only cares about short-term cash extraction can beat out the people focused on long-term value by taking advantage of consumer ignorance.

A good example here is food. Before the rise of industrial meat production, you would process meat yourself or buy it from a local butcher. You had a lot of information about the meat because the processing chain was short and local. You knew the people touching your food and could smell how clean they kept the butcher shop.

But scaling that up created a lot of opacity. Suddenly it was much harder to know what went into your sausage. It was tens, hundreds, thousands of people involved, spread over many miles. Some dubious people took advantage, and so we ended up with food standards like the Federal Meat Inspection Act. [1] The system that grew out of that works pretty well; things Boar's Head recently killing 9 people [2] are surprisingly rare.

For things less risky than safety, I think a lot of good is done by people like Consumer Reports and Wirecutter. Less ignorance about which products are really good is less room for bad actors to exploit consumers. If people really didn't want nice things, those would be much less popular. Instead, I think they're a sign that people do want nice things, but just have an awful lot to do, and so can't spend much time on a single purchasing decision unless it's a really big deal for them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Meat_Inspection_Act, with a nod to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_listeriosis...

Great examples. I think another case, especially in business/it, is that the people doing the purchasing aren't often the people using the products. This means the incentive structure often doesn't prioritize a good product, but instead whatever appeals to the buyer (perhaps lower cost, features, created by a known entity, e.g. no one got fired buying ibm).

> We do generally want nice things, but we can't be experts in all the things.

Counter-point: People complain a lot about leg-room on airplanes. They say they'll pay more for leg room. However, it's very well known (empirically) that they won't pay. People want the cheapest seat - period.

Leg room is very transparent. Consumers can't be fooled. People may want nice things, but they won't pay for it.

Mr. Beast is just giving people what they empirically want.

I don't think that's a great counterpoint for a few reasons.

One is that leg room isn't particularly transparent. If I search for flights, the price is much more visible than a leg room measure. Two, people can certainly be fooled; for a long time airlines have been playing a game of gradually ratcheting back amenities without being up front about it. This is the same game that consumer packaged goods companies play with apparent package size. Three, people pay for more leg room all the time. Last I booked a flight, about half the plane was first class, business class, economy plus, or exit rows. Personally, I sometimes pay for it and sometimes don't. When I don't, it's sometimes because I resent how grossly extractive airlines have gotten.

I also think "empirically want", however cute it is as a linguistic trick, is not particularly accurate. Is it what gets him paid? I'd believe it. Is it what they watch? Sometimes, for some people! But pretending that short-term behavior is equivalent to what somebody really wants is choosing to ignore a great deal. It's like saying alcoholics "want" to drink themselves to death.

Google Flights shows the leg room in inches, and there's several sites that you can research it on.

However most concretely, back in 2000, American removed a few rows of coach across its entire narrow body fleet to give passengers an extra 3-5 inches of legroom throughout coach. They did not recover the costs and walked it back. jetBlue provides more legroom through all of coach, and even I as a very tall person, don't go out of my way to book them.

Some people will pay more for extra legroom, and I think the current split of seating in planes is likely right around the optimal distribution based on who will and won't pay.

> Two, people can certainly be fooled; for a long time airlines have been playing a game of gradually ratcheting back amenities without being up front about it.

Kind of but not really. Yeah they're not going to put out a press release when they take the olives off your salad. Airlines are an incredibly low margin commodity business. Many years they're negative margins. American's current operating margin is 3.41% [1] This is typical. These aren't B2B SaaS margins we're talking about.

So generally when they take the olives off your salad, instead of putting out a press release they just lower fares on competitive routes. Because most people book on fare or based on corporate contract, which is a second-order effect of fare.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAL/american-airli...

i think the Jetblue thing is historically true but not anymore.

The Jetblue thing is also not really altruistic, but a nice side effect of an optimization they did; the removal of the seats brought the capacity to their planes to a round number of 50, which happens to be the FAA required ratio of persons per flight attendant.

> jetBlue provides more legroom through all of coach, and even I as a very tall person, don't go out of my way to book them.

How tall are you? I will literally skip a family vacation if I can't get a better seat on an airplane, to the point it's caused strain in my personal life.

I agree with your overall assessment that people will (usually) buy the cheapest thing, but I find it utterly bizarre a truly tall person wouldn't even care about being physically uncomfortable for hours on end. I'm curious if we just disagree on what "very tall" means, like 6' is not that tall.

I'm 6'5". To be clear I do always try for an extra legroom seat unless it's like 1 or maybe 2 hours tops. I don't go out of my way to pick jetBlue, so the "everyone gets legroom" thing isn't a real competitive advantage. I just consolidate my flying with a carrier and with even the lowest status tiers you generally get free extra legroom seating. Not giving everyone extra legroom seats means they can lower the sticker price and reward frequent fliers. The short people don't get nearly as much benefit from the extra leg room and don't value the seat as much so higher density means lower prices for everyone.

When I didn't have status I just paid for it, but every seat having extra legroom isn't in and of itself enough to move the needle for me.

IMO it's very costly to compare legroom and is often obscured and switched up. Also people might use 'legroom' to also mean more expansive things like shoulder width of their seat, and that is definately not something you can buy with economy plus. Seat width has shrunk several inches and is universally reduced on all airline by now. To get back to 18/19" seat width, you have to pay double or triple, which seems absurd for a 12% to 20% increase in width.

> Kind of but not really.

You write this in a tone of contradiction, but as far as I can tell we're describing the exact same thing. I understand why the airlines do it, but it doesn't change what customers experience.

Well the other thing is paying for luggage. No-one wants to pay for luggage. But if luggage is free, it means that everyone with no/small luggage is just subsidizing those with luggage.

Charging for luggage is fine.

The problem is when luggage costs the same or more as ticket without luggage.

I don't think I've ever seen the legroom listed on a flight comparison site. Is that a thing?

Google flights lists legroom for most flights. Although it doesn't seem like you can filter on legroom.

The question is, was it rock solid with few features? I don't know if it was this article I saw earlier but seeing how Salesforce has a lot of customizability and a Visual builder and maybe much of it was vaporware initially but maybe they simply scratched the right annoyances the customers had by providing features for that quickly enough.

Seen some ERP's for mid-sized customers and the good ones makes it easy to build views and otherwise customize the software up to a point for non-engineers. The code is shit but they've also produced a lot of things needed internally that we wouldn't have gotten done quickly enough by doing it manually.

https://retool.com/blog/salesforce-for-engineers

IIRC the start up was beaten out by volume of features, granted some didn't work on Salesforce, but people buy software based on features for sure.

> We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things.

What was the price(s) of that start up and what was the prices of Salesforce? What were the features of the start up and that of Salesforce?

Different people think different things are "nice" (correctly or incorrectly). If you're offering things that you think are nice, but the customer does not care about, are you surprised that they go elsewhere?

You also have to understand what customers say they want, and the things that they are actually going to evaluate on: the two may not be the same.

And even if we want the nice things, we may not actually be able to afford them.

The issue is that the customers aren't us engineers, despite us being the ones who will interface with it more than the actual customer (the business owners).

>And even if we want the nice things, we may not actually be able to afford them.

Sure hope that wasn't the case. If they can't afford a proper tool for employees (which is maybe a few tens of thousands a year at worst. a fraction of an employee) how are they going to afford me?

I'm sure it's just penny pinching, but I sure hope a boss never says outright "we can't afford this tool" without very good reason.

I've been seeing a product we use at my organization roll out incomplete/trash feature fast to have a product, and then fix them after the fact.

We've gotten tons of blow back as other teams use the product and find it next to useless with tons of bugs, and I'm stuck trying to push it. Not a fun place to be.

Learned a lot about the software market and capitalism though.

> We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things.

We? I was IT for a brief period and one day management says "We need this Salesforce Outlook plugin deployed to all the front office users." No one bothered to tell us "Hey, we're evaluating CRM software and would appreciate your technical opinion."

So there's your "we" and I'm sure they weren't looking for quality engineering or rock solid code when deciding. In fact it was picked because the manager heard the name salesforce at some business conference and was told by someone there it was the best CRM out there so you better get on that train or be left in the dust. So we installed the plugins, got paid and moved on with life. And to be honest we didn't care either.

> We as people pick the winners with our money, we don't really want nice things.

I do, and I reject being branded as part of "we" here; most people and orgs just have bad taste. ("Taste" at an organizational level obviously being an emergent property rather than literally the same as the homonymous trait in individuals.)

I like to think I do too.

However, I think we can recognize a collective we that even if the individual might not do a thing ... we're all in the same boat in the end.

I think part of Apple’s success is because they give people nice things.

They do indeed treat customers well.

The devs... man, it's a constant battle. And their dev tool quality is all over the place. It's no wonder they lost the desktop market, and only swing in app devs due to market dominance.

The market is always looking to be seen, understood and helped.

Even a little help in the mix of those 3 can be overlooked more than it ought to be.

Perfect really is the enemy of Great/Good.

> [They] were a very "engineering focused" (or similar term) organization. Their code was rock solid.

I'll bet it wasn't. You're hearing this from the person who ran the company. Most companies have terrible code, and I'll bet the people running those companies would also say they were "engineering focused" and had "rock solid" code. They're just wrong.

>Most companies have terrible code

1. that's a pretty horrible interpretation for an engineer to have. Though I feel "code" and "codebases" are different topics to consider. There will always be some bad code as long as multiple people work on a codebase (because you're simply not going to have a principle programmer stuck doing minor bug fixes). I argue most truly bad codebases fail early (or become bad later, when being a "good codebase" is no longer a selling point for them, and as people shuffle in and out).

2. even if it's true that most companies have tereible codebases, I argue good codebases with no traction is worse than bad codebases with traction. Ideally we have good code with traction, but this example shows that even multimillion dollar companies will be sold on promises rather than proper features.

> And this is why we can't have nice things.

Indeed, and that's why OP wrote its list of counterpoints. In theory, a company can make a lot of money by creating products that are aligned with users' interests. Unfortunately, in today's world this is more difficult to do rather than taking advantage of users in some way. Still, if we don't oppose these practices there will never be a change, so it's worth fighting for our rights as users.

This is exactly correct. See distinction between “best produced videos” and “best YOUTUBE” videos - it’s not about making the best video, it’s about making the one that minmaxes the metrics

Youtube needs a metric to not promote low quality videos with low intentionality. No one searches for Mr beast videos with intent to watch them. The audience is primarily children who will watch whatever slop the algorithm puts in front of them. We need something like china where algorithms push quality educational content.

> The audience is primarily children

Ask me how I know you didn’t read the handbook! Over 50% of the audience is >=25

Sure, but a lot of people are besides brain-dead slop-consumers.

That doesn't really challenge the proposal about regulating content.

(I personally recoil at the proposition of China-like content moderation but whatever.)

Algorithm moderation is not content moderation. A recent court case found that algorithmic recommendations don't fall under section 230 protection.

The brain isn't full developed until 25-30 years old. I changed a lot, mentally, in my late 20's to early 30's. 25 is still a borderline child.

Because of COPPA <=13 year olds aren't allowed on youtube so they lie about their age. These youtubers perpetuate this lie because >=25 is a more valuable ad targeting demographic.

> The audience is primarily children who will watch whatever slop the algorithm puts in front of them.

low quality consumption doesn't have an age range. Sometimes you just want to watch a cozy cat video, so I get it.

>We need something like china where algorithms push quality educational content.

that sounds horrible for multiple reasons that could be a post in and of itself. I'll just point out the obvious one from the post itself:

>Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible.

If the algorithm shifts, they will shift and I'm sure something goodhearted like "make the best educational videos" will find some loophole to slip in clickbait or any other engagement metric.

Ultimately, let me curate my own filters. I can't save everyone else but let me make sure I never see that stuff if I don' want to.

Mr. Beast is FAR from the most pathological content on YouTube.

> Some counterpoints:

The goal would be to be more customer-focused in those cases.

"No one prospers without rendering benefit to others." — Tadao Yoshida, founder of YKK zippers, https://ykkamericas.com/our-philosophy/

With MrBeast, the "best YOUTUBE video" would be one that causes engagement with the viewer throughout the video:

> The creative process for every video they produce starts with the title and thumbnail. These set the expectations for the viewer, and everything that follows needs to be defined with those in mind. If a viewer feels their expectations are not being matched, they’ll click away - driving down the crucial Average View Duration that informs how much the video is promoted by YouTube’s all-important mystical algorithms.

You have to both entice the viewer with the thumbnail/title, and meet the expectations of the viewer so they continue watching.

Your counterexamples are a bunch of instances where the company did not meet customer expectations.

> No one prospers without rendering benefit to others

Plenty of counterexamples for this as well. Snake oil salesmen, drug dealers, woo peddlers, gurus, politicians, grifters, scammers, thieves, and on and on...

I hate that so many people live by “wisdom” that falls apart at the slightest scrutiny…

Our lives are made up of and guided by narratives that sound good and just on paper, but are empirically proven wrong time and time again. Yet they persist.

Some come from the zeitgeist, others are eternal, biblical, and worse, unfalsifiable: "everything happens for a reason," "if you're meant to be together, you will be together," "just do a good job and you'll get what you deserve". The latter was voiced by my postdoc advisor, who did not take the time to look at the percentage of researchers who did good work but did not get a tenure-track position. But perhaps those who did not find jobs did not do good enough work, and the charade continues.

Almost all of his examples are/were failures, by all metrics.

Cause and effect requires observation, which means there will be a time delay between when a company does something shady and when the customers realize the rug was pulled out from under them. You can't know a pinto is going to blow up before it blows up. Once people realized, it almost destroyed the company [1]. The time delay between a correction in a company is even longer, because it requires another layer of observation.

None of these are proof that the error correction mechanism is broken, or that the quote is somehow untrue/fragile. Most of the egregious examples of broken feedback are those companies that make the red and blue politicians multi millionaires by the time they retire, usually with no-consequences government contracts.

edit: and, this fails miserably if you don't pay any attention to the end goal, which I've seen several times.

[1] https://www.autoweek.com/news/a2099001/ford-100-defective-pi...

nit: you can indeed know a pinto would blow up before it blows up. But you go to your city square and get laughed at because they trust Ford over some car mechanic who looked deeply into the car.

Of course, I'm describing a literal forum here (physical forums! good times). I wonder how many whistleblowers out there highlighted some dark pattern in the past 20 years and were cast off as a conspiracy nut. Both publicly and in internal company channels.

nit2: it's so strange how times have changed. 40-50 years ago his Pinto recall was company ending. Nowadays the Cybertruck has had what? 5 recalls now? And it still has this bizarre cult behind it. What happened to people? what happened to wanting a driveable car (nevermind those truck minded audiences the cybertruck targets who claims to do more than just drive)?

nit2, here are the four Cybertruck recalls [1].

1. Windshield wiper motor failure.

2. Loose trim from the bed.

3. Accelerator pedal can stick.

4. Wrong sized font used for the warning lights.

Wiper was fixed with OTA update. Accelerator pedal was fixed on all trucks within the first week after it was discovered.

> And it still has this bizarre cult behind it.

That doesn't mean sales haven't been hurt, but anyone actually interested will see that the above list isn't an issue. Toyota had a similar recall some years ago, and it hurt their sales too [3]. It's a good idea to skip first model years of any car.

[1] https://www.cars.com/research/tesla-cybertruck/recalls/

[3] https://www.npr.org/2010/02/02/123283959/gas-pedal-woes-put-...

You're right about 4 and maybe 2. But #3 is pretty much by biggest one of my top 3 fears in a car. Stuck accelerator or non-working breaks. I was already cast off before hand but I'd never buy a new [car brand] car knowing that kind of issue existed before.

#1 is a big issue but not for my area.

> I'd never buy a new [car brand] car knowing that kind of issue existed before.

There's some severe information bias here. If you actually believe this, then you're basically restricted from buying most vehicles. Toyota is out [1] along with, BMW [2], Ford [3], Chevy [4], Honda [5], Volvo [6], Mercedes [7] and more. The cars affected in those are similar to orders of magnitude more. These were all first results, one vehicle, but I'm sure there are many more examples for each.

The odd tribalism is what I find most interesting about the Cybertruck. And no, I'm not interested in buying a Cybertruck.

[1] https://www.cars.com/articles/toyota-recalls-2-3-million-veh...

[2] https://repairpal.com/recall/04V409000

[3] https://repairpal.com/recall/99V265000

[4] https://www.asburyauto.com/gmc-accelerator-pedal-recall

[5] https://www.asburyauto.com/honda-accelerator-pedal-recall

[6] https://www.motorsafety.org/volvo-recalls-xc40-bev-suvs-that....

[7] https://www.panish.law/2012/08/stuck-gas-pedal-risk-prompts-...

Well I did pretty good, because I never owned any of these brands of cars.

But I was talking more about models, not "all teslas are banned". If they can improve on these issues in next year's model, then that's something to be encouraged, not dropped altogether over one fixable issue.

>The odd tribalism is what I find most interesting about the Cybertruck.

I don't particularly care about any car enough to attack/defend it. But A bad pedal is a bad pedal, and I'm lucky if I get more than one time to learn that lesson in person. Of course I'm going to be wary if a recall this serious occurs.

> "No one prospers without rendering benefit to others." — Tadao Yoshida

This quote describes how things should be, not how things actually are.

In the long run it is true.

Name a company which has prospered, over many years, without rendering benefit to its customers.

Real estate agencies? Most middleman in general have a shakey premise for if they "benefit" their customers.

On a less subjectve level, I feel the "Embrace, extend, extinguish" mentality runs counter to this ideal. the FAANGs did indeed render benefit to its customers early on. You can argue by now almost all of them 20 years later have long shifted towards being gatekeepers that employ dark patterns or outright rent seek these days, rather than acting like a customer-focused company.

Virtually every casino and gambling company in existence.

Are you suggesting casino and bookmakers' clients derive no utility at all from gambling? In the absence of any enjoyment or other benefit, who forces the clients to participate?

Same argument can be made for tobacco salesmen, drug dealers etc. If people pay money for something then they MUST derive some benefit from it... I find that assumption questionable.

Other things I could mention: multi-level marketing, snake oil sellers e.g. homeopathy astrology etc.

I find the assumption that every casino and gambling company in existence provides no benefit, of any kind, to any of their customers....extremely questionable.

In MrBeast's case, his revenue is directly correlated with customer engagement via YouTube's algorithm. I'm sure that were it legal, gladiatorial combat would be very popular and profitable on YouTube. I suppose one could make an argument that it would therefore "beneficial".

In the other aforementioned cases, in absence of an algorithm, revenue-generating activity wasn't as well correlated with meeting customer expectations. The point is that companies will always optimize for their own revenue, regardless of how well or poorly their activity meets customer expectations.

Their definition of "best copier possible" was "most-profitable copier possible", meaning they had to balance getting people to not hate it so much they chose competitors, while not being so reliable it didn't need warrantees and services and parts etc?

> not being so reliable it didn't need warrantees[sic] and services and parts etc?

The thing is, nothing is completely maintenance free, esp. if there's something mechanical. Make wearing parts wear, core parts robust. All my laser printers were Samsung/Xerox (hah), and their "core" is made like a tank. Only its rollers, toner and imaging/drum kits wear down, and these are already consumables.

The device keeps track the life of every of these replaceable components, and you replace them you hit these marks, because they're already worn down to hinder reliable operation (Imager dies at 9K pages, rollers at 20K pages IIRC).

You don't need to make things fail prematurely to make something profitable. First one of these printers didn't have replaceable rollers, so I had to donate it after 11 years of operation. This one is almost 8 years old IIRC, and it's still going strong. I'll be using it as long as I can find spares for it, because it's engineered "correctly", not "for profit". Meantime, its manufacturer can still profit from parts, toner and imaging units.

Not copiers, but the ice cream machines in mcdonalds resturants were kept unreliable because mcdonalds made money on the constant repairs. It didn't matter to them that the franchisee was losing money. When 3rd party companies jumped in to fix the machines the manufacturer and mcdonalds acted to stop that happening. There was a court case brought by the third party companies, which they recently lost.

> ...they recently lost.

Who is "they"?

They being the third party repair companies. Johnny Harris did a long piece on the whole story [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4

Actually, it looks like the feds have sided with the 3rd parties?

https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/14/24101023/ftc-doj-comment-...

Why did you write sic after you quoted “warrantees”?

The correct spelling is "warranties" (since singular y becomes i when it gets plural).

[sic] means "I copied the word as written in its original, and it was already written that way" [0].

[0]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sic

I probably meant warranties but warrantees works in the sentence just fine too :)

Hey, as long as it's readable, I don't care. I just wanted to note that I quoted you verbatim, not judge you because you pressed letter "e" twice instead of once in an internet forum. :)

In my experience, people very rarely use [sic] when quoting on internet forums - readers will assume any quote was copied and pasted; and the quoted text is directly above yours.

Sometimes people edit their comments after they realize their mistakes; grammar, spelling or otherwise. I use [sic] to denote that "it was like that when I copied it". It's probably from my "old internet" days (/., local forums, etc.).

I think something that companies often miss is that improving the experience in an area where you have a monopoly can still increase profits by encouraging increased usage of that area.

The example I always go to is U-Haul in the US. They have a functional monopoly on quickly getting a pickup truck or small box car. I used to tell people there was no need to own a pickup truck because I could go grab one for $30 once or twice a month when I needed it.

After a year of shitty apps, constantly being sold things I didn't need because they try to secretly upsell you 50 times during checkout. Having to go into the store to get the keys and wait in line for 1 hour behind people screaming about how they were cheated... I bought a truck.

U-Hual still has their monopoly, but they lost my business, not because I went to a competitor, but because I altered my life to no longer need their business.

Maybe instead of buying eink tablets, I would have kept printing things had printers been better products.

U-haul is one of the shittiest experiences possible. Right there with calling comcast and going to the dmv. Compare that to truck rental from Lowe’s or Home Depot that’s actually probably more expensive but way more pleasant.

Only problem is that everyone else also has figured that out so hard to secure one.

>- Ford didn't fix Pinto's fuel tank, prioritizing cost minimization over "best possible car in its class".

This is a nit-pick, but for the record, The Pinto didn't explode at higher rates than other similar automobiles, also there wasn't an internal Ford Memo, it was an attachment to a letter to the NHTSA --but all people remember is the this so called "memo" Anyhow a myth was born and it seemingly refuses to die. By the numbers:

In 1975-76, the Pinto averaged 310 fatalities a year. But the similar-size Toyota Corolla averaged 313, the VW Beetle 374 and the Datsun 1200/210 came in at 405.

Additional info: https://newmarksdoor.typepad.com/mainblog/2005/07/the_pinto_...

That's not a counterpoint, that's a list of examples of exactly what they're saying.

They're not saying make the best product possible, they're saying make the product that sells the most despite quality.

I do not view these as counterpoints. You are making the same point, which is that the metric one optimizes for is extremely important. MrBeast is solely focused on maximizing revenue on the YouTube platform. The examples you cite also demonstrate the same exact metric (i.e., profit) in other domains. I know HP was in the habit of crippling its printers to extract more money, to add to your other examples.

Out of curiosity, what's wrong with Intel? Are you referring to their selling more capable parts for more money? If so, that does not strike me as a shady practice to maximize profits. More like how the best fruit goes for export, where it can fetch the most return.

Those are problematic business goals, right? I think that's very different to aligning team goals to company goals.

Well a lot of these aren't counterpoints but rather examples of when companies naively followed KPIs to their own detriment. Boing has fallen from dominance to a distant second, Windows has been steadily losing dominance, Ford's darker years were around the Pinto fiasco.

While Microsoft as a whole is still quite strong, Ford and Boeing lost significant market position and the losses are partially attributed to these very mistakes.

You are not wrong, but I'd suggest that in those cases the company prioritized short and medium term profit over the long term success of the company. Each of the situations you list ended up costing those companies dearly (except maybe Dyson?), and today they serve as cautionary tales. So I think the original point of "keeping the main thing the main thing" stands.

A good example here is Betamax. A lot of people lament that Betamax lost despite being better on a lot of measures: picture quality, etc. But what Betamax wasn't better at than VHS was runtime, and an early application of home VCRs was to time-shift NFL games, which ran longer than Betamax could record. It turns out that the end of NFL games is often the most important part, so people bought VHS instead of Betamax. So best is not some idealized thing, but depends a lot on what exactly you're measuring.

But also... this isn't doing well for Boeing? It's costing the money? I don't think Boeing is a template for success.

Those still seem like examples of “whatever the company is trying to achieve”, be it profitability, domination, cost minimisation etc.

> - Dyson's some batteries are notorious for killing themselves via firmware on slight cell imbalance instead of doing self-balancing. Dyson prioritize "steady income via killing good parts early" instead of "building the best vacuum possible".

Any good alternatives?

If you really want a Dyson, a better firmware: https://github.com/tinfever/FU-Dyson-BMS

If you are OK on alternatives, YouTube channel ProjectFarm has some vacuum reviews.

Mine doesn't seem to have any problem with batteries. Just "airways blocked" error no matter what I do and the warranty/support service isn't very helpful. So I'm looking for a similar-or-better quality clone (cordless vacuum with the laser thing) but with better service.

I went down the vacuum rabbit hole a few years ago. I decided on Sebo. These are more or less big ugly machines with a cord, but you can buy every part online no matter how small (screws, gaskets,etc) or big (motors, control boards, etc).

Riccar, Miele, SEBO. Brands you may not have heard of (I know I hadn't). Highly recommend a visit to your local vacuum repair store. Talk to the guy who's job is fixing all the shitty stick vacs.

Not to stan for Dyson, but they're not a vacuum-cleaner company, they're a fire-prevention company. Every decisionmaking process they undertake is going to have that at the top of the list. They don't want a lot of batteries in the field that are being stretched to the limits of their operating lives.

Of course, the company's best response to that concern would be to make the batteries easily replaceable, including by third-party products. But that's where job #2 comes in: make sure the consumer has to buy a new Dyson sooner rather than later.

Then why design batteries with built-in cell balancing support, and remove the resistors to disable the feature in the last moment?

You can safely say that if the battery pack's total capacity drops under 75%, disable it, or detect dead cells and take action.

Disabling life prolonging features while having a full MCU and a nice battery IC on board smells fishy to me.

I swapped to Shark and haven't looked back. Current one takes an absolute beating (masses of dog hair, kids mess, countryside dirt walked into the house etc. etc.) and still performs perfectly after 3+ years of almost daily (ab-)use

DeWalt, or any other power tool battery adapter like this: https://www.amazon.com/HICOPEET-Compatible-Motorhead-v7-v8/d...

Power tool batteries have BMS, better chargers, and if you have multiple batteries, you get infinite vacuuming powers.

> Some counterpoints:

Maybe all of these companies succeeded _despite_ these?

I suspect the intent was the best for the customer. Like it or not, YouTube is the customer here. The viewers are YouTube's customers.

I'd say the viewers are YouTube's quatloos.

Advertisers and people seeking behavior modification out of populations are YouTube's customers. MrBeast understands this. The MrBeast goal is to get and stay #1 at whatever YouTube wants, for the purpose of being #1 at whatever YouTube wants. That purpose can be any number of things, MrBeast doesn't care. It's purpose-agnostic.

What? Literally that’s the pint. If your goal is to screw over your costumers to maximize profit then the active still applies. Depends on what your goals are.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com