Taste Is Eating Silicon Valley

Very well written post with some great formatting/pacing, but I think they’re overselling the novelty of the central point for blog reasons. To cut to the quick:

  Taste is some combination of design, user experience, and emotional resonance that defines how a product connects with people and aligns with their values and identity. 

That definition certainly captures taste, but I think it’s far too large of a net. UX and design are engineering, specifically the field of HCI in this case, and it’s been important at least since Google beat Yahoo with its minimalist UX.

In other, more direct words: at no point in Silicon Valley could you “hire the best engineers and stand back”, YC has been emphasizing ephemeral stuff like PMF, team culture, and user-centric design since the jump.

I’m quite biased, but I think the question of “what is taste” needs to draw on philosophy for answers, at the very least to put a new theory in opposition to the old ones. There’s literally 2000y of aesthetics work in western philosophy to draw from, after all!

As a Kantian, the core of the answer is simple: beauty is unmotivated pleasure endowed with a sense of objective validity. See https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-aesthetics/#WhatJudg... This helps us with the current question in a couple ways.

First, it teaches us why UX wouldn’t normally be considered aesthetic, since it’s often quite instrumental.

More importantly, it reminds us that it’s not enough to appeal to some particular audience’s particular tastes, but that you must also present something they see as objectively or universally beautiful. Hacker types love their complex toolbars and cottagecore Etsy witches love their goofy fonts, but I think both groups recognize those preferences as personal. A truly tasteful website is one that brings joys in the little universal ways — the “juice”, as I recently learned it’s called in the game design world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_feel

Thanks for posting! Definitely thought provoking, and I absolutely agree with the motivating point, if not the phrasing.