But what if I want a faster horse?
rakhim.exotext.com
rakhim.exotext.com
If you're designing a consumer-oriented web service like Netflix or Spotify or Instagram, you will probably add in some user analytics service, and use the insights from that analysis to inform future development. However, that analysis will aggregate its results over all your users, and won't pick out the enthusiasts, who will shape discourse and public opinion about your service. Consequently, your results will be dominated by people who don't really have an opinion, and just take whatever they're given.
Think about web browsers. The first popular browser was Netscape Navigator; then, Internet Explorer came onto the scene. Mozilla Firefox clawed back a fair chunk of market share, and then Google Chrome came along and ate everyone's lunch. In all of these changes, most of the userbase didn't really care what browser they were using: the change was driven by enthusiasts recommending the latest and greatest to their less-technically-inclined friends and family.
So if you develop your product by following your analytics, you'll inevitably converge on something that just shoves content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase, because that's what the median user of any given service wants. (This isn't to say that most people are tasteless blobs; I think everyone is a connoisseur of something, it's just that for any given individual, that something probably isn't your product.) But who knows - maybe that really is the most profitable way to run a tech business.
Just like football scouts need to actually visit some niche teams and watch not that interesting stuff to find talent before it is too late.
With tech it might be easier because you might create niche groups so those people come to you.
Just like PG created HN. Nowadays HN is too mainstream so all ideas here are seem already popular so it is like going to scout high school t am that won local championship everyone already knows which players are lined for pro contracts.
Product-Market fit is great if you're developing a SaaS business but it's not necessarily going to give you new inventions — something new is speaking to a potential gap in the market that doesn't currently exist.
Indie Hackers is full of people trying to flog their shit AI-powered marketing SaaS, because they've never done anything other than software engineering, so they don't know any good problems to solve. There are uncountably many good problems out there, each with thousands of people who would pay you money to solve them, but those people don't know their problems can be solved by a computer, so you have to go out into the world to find them yourself.
That is indeed a big problem with software engineering/engineers today. No other expertise other than being a framework monkey.
Ultimately, analytics are just a view into the business. This thread is complaining about doctors not using microscopes when diagnosing system issues - sometimes a narrow slice is important, sometimes you need to zoom out. If you focus on your "early adopters" or power users exclusively, without understanding how they affect the business, then you are at risk of building things that most of your user base doesn't want.
Power User Analysis: https://andrewchen.com/power-user-curve/
For street usage, I think those cars are popular because they’re beautiful more than because they’re fast (or because enthusiasts like them).
My utterly soulless Lexus will drive more than fast enough to get me in serious trouble. No one will look at it and feel stirred by its beauty, whereas the typical Ferrari or Porsche coupe will look at least appealing to most and beautiful to many, even those who can’t tell the three marques apart or even unaided recall the name Lamborghini.
P.S. I think it's telling that Porsche wasn't mentioned almost at all in English until the mid 1950s, given their role in the war!
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Ferrari%2CLamb...
Up until about 1948, Porsche was a pure development contractor mostly for the government. They only started manufacturing cars under their own brand in the early 50s (a few 356 built basically in a shed notwithstanding) after Ferry Porsche had taken over, and with the introduction of the 911 began a meteoric rise as a volume manufacturer for international markets.
Ferraris, Porsches and similar are somewhat attainable, which, I think, helps with their being symbols, since most people have already actually seen them and know they're real. A Koenigsegg is as good as a story. Hell, I live in Paris and I've never actually seen one. Porches and Ferraris? They're seemingly everywhere.
As to why Koenigsegg doesn't get the rep, I'll take the outside opinion that it's because their name is too inaccessible whereas "Bugatti" slips easily into rap lyrics.
It’s a mixture of enthusiasm and conspicuous consumption. Most enthusiasts love 90s japanese cars, but the average person sees an old mazda and recoils.
But put an old ferrari in front of anyone and they have a completely different reaction.
There's no million dollar Japanese supercars competing against Lamborghinis and McLarens, but I wouldn't say they stopped making sports cars.
Well there was the NSX
The WRX has a turbocharged Boxer engine, manual gearbox or optional CVT, and all-wheel drive. It’s a sedan, but it does a 13.9 second quarter mile stock off the showroom floor. That’s not bad.
The FRS/BRZ/GR86 are identical cars mechanically, Toyota owns Scion, so the FRS was replaced by the GT86 and later GR86 within the Toyota line-up when Toyota killed off the Scion brand in the US, and the FRS never existed outside the North American market, because Scion was a North American exclusive brand.
The BRZ/GR86 has a Subaru Boxer engine, with Toyota D4S Port+Direct Injection, using a Toyota ECU/ECM, Toyota/Aisin transmission, Toyota TCU/TCM, and Toyota infotainment (in some generations), but with a mostly Subaru designed chassis and nearly entirely Subaru suspension and post-transmission driveline, but the wheels and tires off a Prius (in the first generation), and a handful of things that were only created to be jointly used by the BRZ/GR86. Except no matter which part you pick on the car, it'll be marked "Subaru", including ironically the Toyota badge on the front of the GT86.
It's better to think of them as what they are, which is different branding for the same vehicle, that was jointly developed and manufactured.
The comment I was replying to said that people buy porsches because they’re beautiful.
That’s not it, because the NSX is beautiful, the LFA is beautiful, the FD is beautiful, but nobody wants to spend 200K on a Toyota.
Cars are a signifier, and the viewer needs to understand that sign. Luxury car makers bank on that. Put an LFA and a Cayman next to each other and 9/10 people would think the Cayman is worth more.
The original commenters idea works for content, because content is not a signifier of money. Rich people can’t have more expensive media taste than you, so the enthusiasts set the pace.
But they can have a more expensive car, so no matter how awful a car a lamborghini is, nobody envies the Integra type R next to it.
My girlfriend thinks my cheap modern shitbox is more expensive than my old 90's 4x4 truck.
GTRs absolutely do not stand out. They look like your your average sedan.
The average person who doesn't know much about cars will think a second generation MR2 is more exotic than it is. Toyota probably wouldn't make their top three brand guesses. The R34 GT-R will thrill every car enthusiast (and probably everyone who had a Playstation around the turn of the millennium), but most people won't give it a second look.
The Japanese economy continued to grow until the mid 1990s. I think the real culprit was low birth rate in the prior 20 years did not train the next generation of productive workers. China, South Korea most of Europe face similar issues
Except for the Toyota nerds who will want to come talk to you about the LFA. Ask me how I know!
When it came out the LFA was widely lampooned by the car media for being too "soft", not fast enough, and generally lacking spirit and individuality. It's not pretty much recognized in hindsight that it's one of the single greatest cars ever made, and everybody who regularly buys/drives supercars regrets not buying one when they were still being produced.
Weirdly, many people realized this when it was new, that the LFA was actually excellent, but like anything else cars go through different hype cycles where media organizations and insiders focus on different parameters for what they think makes something good, and the LFA came out during a hype cycle that was focused on raw speed, as it was released around the time that "hypercars" were gaining steam as a concept.
Personally, having driven an LFA one time, I quite literally have regular dreams about the memory, and I wish that I owned one. It's on my bucket list.
It’s comfortable, safe, and dead-nuts reliable, but no one gives a shit about or even notices my hybrid RX450h.
You're more of a car guy than me
OK so we're discussing niche vs mainstream, or "what most people want" vs "what a few want".
The few cars you listed are not popular in the ownership sense, but they are well-known and aspirational.
People can buy them to show off status / money / exclusivity, or perhaps beauty. Speed is table stakes, of course. They have to objectively be better than most cars but also special. They can be strikingly beautiful or strikingly hideous but they must not be ordinary.
If you watch / read reviews of those cars, then it tends to be from the enthusiast driver point of view. Is it good at racing, cornering, reading the driver's intentions and reacting instantly and accurately? But then more often than not, those that can afford them do not buy them to use them for that purpose (or at least not frequently.) Many are treated a bit like investments or merely items in a collection.
What a long-winded way to get back to the original point of faster horses and enshittification of software, eh?
Netflix and Spotify might as well be a Toyota Corolla or Prius. I lost my train of thought. I think I just wanted to pontificate about exotic cars for a while.
(I drive a Polestar 2. It looks like a Volvo, is heavy as a dump truck, but damn is it fast as hell.)
I might just listen to it, if I have it on in the background, which then in turn feeds the algorithm that it made the "correct choice", but it's a million miles away from, say, listening to a radio DJ where you like their rough output but they're cherry-picking what to play next.
In the world of music discovery a bad recommendation engine is maybe better than a hyper-fine-tuned one.
I have a very horrible case of this. One day at night, I slept listening to lofi playlist. The next week all my recommendations were screwed. Horrible assumption on the part of algorithm.
I didn't like it, I didn't share it, I didn't do any other thing than just stare at it in shock.
Big mistake.
For over 6 months that became +50% of my feed. Incredible and depressing amount of people monetising the disability of their friends, siblings, children, or their own. Really effed up content that makes you stop and say wtf out loud. But they also earn a living. But they should do it in a honorable manner. But maybe they don't have the chance. So I flag as not interested but that just swaps those videos with new BRAND NEW "content creators" of this kind that I hadn't yet seen. Wow thanks Instagram.
At some point they changed something in the algorithm and now those videos rarely pop anymore, and I'm wary and scroll away fast.
None of the music services seem to understand that just because you like multiple genres, that doesn't mean that you want it to randomly jump around between them without any consideration for how they flow together.
No it wasn't. It was driven by shady crapware distribution schemes and intentionally subtly broken sites under the big G umbrella.
> In all of these changes, most of the userbase didn't really care what browser they were using: the change was driven by enthusiasts recommending the latest and greatest to their less-technically-inclined friends and family.
I'm confused as to whether your saying change is caused by catering to the median who doesn't care, or the enthusiast who recommends the latest and greatest. You seem to be saying both.
They are doing it to increase “engagement” and so more people will stay on their site longer.
Why else wouldn’t Netflix show the “continue watching” row first instead of forcing you to scroll past algorithmic generated crap?
It is the same reason that Google went from describing success as people getting off their site faster and going to one of the “ten blue links” to the shit show it is today.
If I don’t care enough to finish a movie I may as well start a new one. At the very least it’s not a clear choice.
Why not let users choose? Because, sadly, it's about money and not about users.
Presumably the best thing for Netflix is to have a happy userbase, so why do you assume it wouldn't optimize for that?
People want joy, education, entertainment, etc. from watching a video.
But there may be other ways of appealing to people (addiction, insecurity, base stimulation) which boost engagement but which do not give users what they want.
Obviously on even slightly longer time scales, users will gravitate toward services that do not trade their health for engagement, but equally obvious is that many of today's apps are not optimizing for long time scales.
Netflix cannot make you happy
1. I wouldn’t say the car veands you mentioned are popular because they can hit high speeds. In my experience nearly any car can with the right engine and equipment in it (of course due to weight distribution and other details I assume they’re not all equally safe but that aside).
Personally when I look at those brands I think they’re sleek and pretty and when I feel like wanting one it’s because they’re expensive cars, driven by the rich. They’re not chosen only by the rich cause they have the best taste, they’re chosen by the rich because they are the only ones to have the financial means to afford one.
Also I feel like the changes made based on analytics arent made to please (more) users but to make as much money as possible, whether that be pleasing users in the starting phases of your company or in the latter phases when you already dominate the market squeezing money out of your big existing userbase.
> is the most profitable way to run a tech business.
Yes, I agree. This does seem to be the most profitable model for running a tech business: maximizing user engagement or increasing the time users spend on the platform. Whether that’s achieved through intentionally convoluted UI or by aggressively surfacing certain content, the end goal remains the same.
That said, I don’t think there’s much room left for significant innovation in video streaming interfaces. The core challenge continues to be content — whoever offers the best or most compelling library wins. UI changes might tweak engagement metrics by a few percentage points, but they’re marginal compared to the impact of strong content.
At the end of the day, if there’s a great movie or series to watch, people will show up. If the content isn’t there, no amount of clever interface design will convince someone to spend 30 minutes on something they’re not actually interested in.
Most great products start out for enthusiasts and often by enthusiasts. They’re opinionated, sharp, sometimes rough, but exciting.
Then VC funding comes in, and the product has to appeal to a broader audience. Things get smoothed out and the metrics rule decisions.
Eventually, the original enthusiasts feel left out. The product’s no longer for them.
So a new product comes out, started again by enthusiasts for enthusiasts. And the cycle repeats - unless someone chooses to grow slowly and sustainably, without raising, and stays focused on the niche.
If you start the slow growth path at 30 and retire at 65 you will overall make more money from that thing vs someone who sells out at 35. There are some catches though. The person who sells out can go on to the next thing which in sum total may be more sell out enough to make far more over their lifetime, while the slow growth plan you are stuck. The slow growth is over very slow at first, you often spend 10 years making far less than someone who is "working for the man", then 15 more years more or less even, and only then start making good money. There is no guarantee that you will be successful, some people spend their entire life making less than they could "working for the man"; others go bankrupt when a new VC competitor suddenly gets better by enough to take your customers.
There is no right answer. VC money sometimes is the best answer - but many people who reaching for VC money when their better long term answer would be to grow slow.
Obviously not all of these are founder centric things but they're all profit driven enterprises. Is it actually just not possible for a typical human to turn down excess profits and take pride in a project rather than a money machine? People seem to think these things used to be better, "no one takes pride in their work anymore", "everything is made to break", etc. What changed?
As such it is not surprise things change. You can't go from making less money than you could elsewhere to making a nice income without a lot of office time.
Of course it is common to take the above too far. There is need for office work, but often those office employees forget that it is about the real world.
The alternative here is to hire and train people to spend time in the office, rather than selling the company to someone who will do so. That has its own potential problems, for sure, but getting your soul eaten by VC is not one of them.
I do not recall the book/essay or the original author, but I recall the quote that “everybody has a price they can’t resist, find out that price…”.
If your enthusiasm product is successful and has potential to be milked, someone somewhere will figure out your price and eventually buy you out.
I'm not saying profit isn't a factor, but a lot of these founders are five year founders, they are using the company as a means to their end. Basically I'm criticizing short sightedness and what it does to our economy. That's why I've turned against the stock market. The high liquidity means you are beholden to thousands of people who view your company as a roulette wheel amongst thousands, who want immediate gains and have no stomach for any losses. And many of the founders are the same people wearing a different hat.
I do agree with your overall criticism of short-sightedness and the short term incentives of VC and the stock market, etc.
But the people involved are not quite as binary as you lay out in the quote above. You can't discount the group of people who really do start out as true believers and who become seduced/deceived by VCs. Some of these VC types are real vultures. They'll convince the founder that the best way to share their vision or product with the most people and do the most good for the world is to let the VC guys use their capital to scale up and expand the reach of the product, etc. The money surely helps to lower one's skepticism/cynicism, but I can imagine that it must be very hard to say no to getting your dream project out to millions of people.
This sounds a lot like Warren Buffett's opinion of stocks. The Berkshire Hathaway Class A stocks are 780k each because he wanted people to act like investors, not speculators.
Most people don't have the patience for it and it's not as flashy. Morgan Housel (author of The Psychology of Money) on what a lot of people don't get about Warren Buffett:
> He's 90 years old. But if you look at the course of his life 99% of his net worth came after his 50th birthday and something like 97% came after his 65th birthday. That's just how compounding Works compounding is not something where the big Returns come in a year or in a decade. It's something that takes place over the course of a lifetime and it's important for someone like Warren Buffett to say look, he's 90 years old. He's been investing full-time since he's been 10 years old. So he's been investing for 80 years now. It's really important. Is that the Math on this is very simple. You can hypothetically say, okay if Warren Buffett did not start investing when he was 10. Let's say hypothetically he started investing when he was 25 like a normal person and let's say hypothetically he did not keep investing through age 90 like he has let's say hypothetically he retired at age 65 like a normal person and he would say he was just as successful and investor during that period that he was investing and he earned the same average annual Returns. What would his net worth be today? If you started investing at 25 and retired at 65 the answer is about Million dollars not 90 billion 12 million. So we know that 99.9% of his net worth can be tied to just the amount of time. He has been investing for that's how compounding works it is. So incredibly powerful, but it is rarely intuitive. Even if you understand the math behind compounding it's almost never to it intuitive how powerful it can be.
The hard bit is to keep taste and discipline at the forefront of design. To not let short-term thinking pollute long-term ambitions. Easier said than done.
I think Apple (very intelligently) made products where the average consumer is the enthusiast. Which is very hard to do when your company is a bunch of engineers.
1. Innovate.
2. Exploit.
You start by innovating a "fast horse". This gains you early adopters who pull in a larger audience. A horse can only be so fast, so continued innovation might lead to something more like a car. This will only cause you to bleed users. Stick to the horse.
Instead of continuing to innovate endlessly, you switch to exploitation. Fire the visionaries. They're just a waste of payroll. Bring in people who can squeeze every last dime out of your user base.
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The above isn't anything new. However, it's clear that some companies are better at maintaining quality while exploiting. Are they doing something different, or is it just that their customers have to choose them repeatedly? e.g. Most people don't sign up with one car company for life. They'll buy several cars over their life and that's a choice that the car company must win each time. Meanwhile, people sign up for Netflix or Spotify and stay subbed. They don't look at the alternatives every few years. Porsche needs to keep up with the latest and fastest horses to continue exploiting their reputation, while Netflix can focus purely on making more money from their users. A faster horse may come along, but Netflix doesn't break down and need to be replaced.
Netflix has their content as their moat. Even if someone today builds a better version of what Netflix used to be, it wouldn't matter. They won’t have the rights and licenses to the shows and movies. That’s what keeps people from switching.
Porsche has to keep earning you as a customer with every new model. Netflix just needs to keep you watching.
What, apart from Stranger Things and Squid Game, has been enough of a cultural touchstone that it keeps people on Netflix? Those aren't things you keep coming back to again and again.
Netflix doesn't own Friends, Seinfeld, The Office, Community, Parks and Rec, etc.
I'd argue Max (nee HBO) has better legacy titles and franchises. They have both enduring IP as well as the reputation of being "destination television".
The thing that keeps people from cancelling Netflix is that they have a better content slate of licensed classics paired with new originals. And they do it in the greatest volume of all the streamers, so there will be "something" on, even if it isn't particularly good.
Arcane was a pretty big deal and it was released on Netflix and TenCent.
They also have continued series that originated on other networks, including Unsolved Mysteries and Black Mirror.
I know several people who watched Cyberpunk: Edgerunners on Netflix and are excited about the upcoming CDPR and Netflix project set in the Cyberpunk universe.
I’ve had recommended to me and have recommended to others quite a few of their original movies. You might like 6 Undergound if you’re looking for an action movie.
And yeah, Bridgerton, Wednesday, Emily in Paris, and 3 Body Problem each certainly take their moment at least in my circles.
I think the Jeffrey Dahmer one was also big, because there have been so many stupid memes about him since then, from people who weren't around to hear about him on the news.
Only Netflix-produced shows apply here. Before Netflix started producing content they had *no moat*.
That's the big problem with media streaming - the content owners have all the leverage. Any profit you make they can see and simply increase licensing costs to transfer to them. If you don't want to pay they can (and will, and have done) start their own competitor since the technology isn't a moat - content ownership is.
The situation with streaming platforms are exactly equivalent, and these content production studios have learnt to prevent this sort of anti-trust legislations from forming.
in fact, the cinema ownership decree has been ended i think: https://www.laineygossip.com/with-sonys-purchase-of-alamo-dr...
I guess it's market-related. Your remarks remind me of Behringer. They make products for the music and audio enthusiasts. They have decent quality products at a very fair price that have been around for 10+ years now (like the X32 mixer) and apart from that, they churn out new products all the time (especially remakes of vintage synthesisers) to keep their users coming back and check out what's new.
> Eventually, the original enthusiasts feel left out. The product’s no longer for them.
I am immediately reminded of when Slack got rid of markdown-style inline formatting, in favor of a WYSIWYG interface, and the internet (or at least, the corner I live in) collectively (and, imo, correctly) lost its shit at them.
Since more of our culture is in online, advertising-dominated spaces -- the forces of capital have a lot of incentive to ensure smooth growth straight to the sociopath phase.
Maybe the key is just accepting the cycle of it all and ensuring there's always cool new places for creative/enthusiastic people to do their thing.
Notably, this process usually involves not creating a simplified interface that can be turned into expert mode but actively removing features, adding cues, and steering user behavior though a psychological maze to achieve desired effects.
Basically, people should understand this corporate lifecycle and stop being deluded by the opening moves in a new market that superficially appear to favor customers, individual empowerment, etc. It is a process that always ends in heartbreak because it serves investors, not the public.
It hadn't occurred to me that that might actually be exactly what's happening.
There are many reasons for products getting worse; sometimes it's because the company making it is trying to appeal to a broader base, so the original enthusiasts are no longer the target. Sometimes it's because different people are involved and they can't produce to the same level. Sometimes things don't really deteriorate, but new innovations make other things more appealing.
Except you're making the mistake of thinking these services are optimizing for their userbase. They are not. They are optimizing for revenue and profit growth, a very different target. More ads, cheaper and easier-to-product content, lower opex.
They are converging to churning out the least offensive slop at the cheapest cost with the maximum revenue.
None of the analytics are about what people using the product want, they are about making the most money and growing the fastest. Nothing would look like the services mentioned in the article if they listened to what the users really preferred.
You cannot paint by numbers.
By the time our society is collapsing and our rivers are catching fire and our government is being overthrown and our oceans are boiling and our bodies are full of plastic and we can't even escape to another planet because of Kessler syndrome -- all due to their actions -- they'll be old. That will be their kids' problems, and we know the CEO caste fucking hates their own kids.
Something is popular, folks are envious of it, they end up building something much like it. Doesn’t matter if it’s houses, logos, or user experiences – seems to be how things work.
Likewise, all social media converges on one model. Strava, which started out a weirder platform for serious athletes, is now is just an infinity scroll with DMs [0]
I do however think that this is an important insight:
> This isn't to say that most people are tasteless blobs; I think everyone is a connoisseur of something, it's just that for any given individual, that something probably isn't your product.
A lot of these companies probably were founded by people who wanted to cater to connoisseurs, but something about the financials of SaaS companies makes scaling to the ad-maximizing format a kind of destiny.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/style/strava-messaging.ht...
I mean that's not really the case for paid services without ads like Netflix. They lose money the more you watch. Ideally you'd continue to pay for the subscription but never watch anything.
If you have a bunch of people who work at companies that are trying to maximize eyeballs then they shuffle around to different companies, are they going to adopt the goals of the new company? Or is their existing perspective and skills going to shape the new company?
I imagine it's a bit of both. Given how big Google and Meta are and how much talent circulates among big tech companies, this might cause companies to lean a bit more heavily into the attention economy than they might otherwise need to.
Also, attention is just easier to measure than satisfaction. Makes it easier to fall down that path.
This is a big part of it. Measuring how long someone stares at the screen is easy. It is in many cases a reasonable proxy for satisfaction - provided you mostly only care about the user as a source of revenue.
The social medias have demonstrated fairly concretely that it's a poor proxy if you care about the user's wellbeing. But they already got their bag, so they are hardly incentivised to fix that now.
What company cares about a users well being? The only companies that might care are ones where the population growth rate of humanity is the bottleneck on their new user acquisition and those companies are slowly morphing into sovereign nations already
They told us they cared about wellbeing. I made a feature that demonstrably improved wellbeing, and we had lots of data and surveys etc to prove it.
But it decreased watch-time on shortform (what we used to call TikTok style) videos so the Director made me delete it. That started my disillusionment process that eventually made me quit.
Money is the only thing that matters to them.
Take how Google sorts results by popularity while it is also the main source of "popularity".
The word means something different now.
The more you watch, the less likely you are to unsubscribe.
If you haven't watched a streamer in a couple of months, that's the first thing you'll cancel when you glance at your credit card statement.
Of course with their ad supported tier they probably don't agree.
But they're a business, so obviously they want you to use it and pay for it.
Is there a circumstance that could cause their stock price to drop to $0 more quickly?
Even critically acclaimed shows like Slow Horses from a supposedly prestige media seller like Apple has scenes where you watch actors put on AirPods Max headphones (obviously with no relevance to the plot).
More accurate is “streaming without discrete ad breaks.”
Yes, or as people call it: "ad-free". We all know what is meant by that phrase, being pedantic about "well actually there are ads regardless" doesn't make communication clearer.
What definition of propaganda are you using here?
There is a clear conflict of interest that can only be addressed by buyers being knowledgeable.
That money goes to the people who made the film though, which in some cases actually is Netflix but not usually.
On the TV show White Collar, the main character is never, shown driving a car, or talking about them, or having any interest in cars whatsoever. He walks around New York City, or is driven in a government employee's car. Yet, in one of the later seasons, he compliments on specific features of a car he is being driven, and has a dialogue about it with another character.
Extremely jarring for anyone paying attention, and obviously advertising. Product placement is sacrificing some portion of the art in exchange for money (or products/services which otherwise reduces production cost).
I think that’s Netflix’s actual goal: deliver nothing anyone wants to watch, but keep on promising the possibility of something one might want to watch in the future.
Which reminds me, we really need to cancel our subscriptions.
A subscription service to cancel and renew your subscriptions. And stretch goal: annually renegotiate your utility bill so it doesn't 4-10X in cost each winter (for those that live in states that can do that).
But in spirit, you would probably only describe it as truly "working" (in the sense of accomplishing its claimed purpose) if as soon as it ran out of things to suggest cancelling, it suggested cancelling itself. Which it doesn't. So no.
Same as a dating site/app — a dating system truly designed in spirit to accomplish its claimed purpose, would seek to minimize the time anyone spends using the app before uninstalling it. And no such site/app exists. (Although it could — as this is basically the business model of a professional matchmaker, where you pay a large lump sum up-front and then they're beholden to do unbounded work to find you a happy relationship. So they seek to minimize how much of their time you spend, by finding you that happy relationship ASAP.)
It would be an interesting world if we outlawed auto-renewal for services that you need to actively use in order to get any value from them. When you're paying for Netflix, you aren't paying to watch movies, you're paying for /access/ to movies you can watch. The flip side is that the maximum potential service quality would decrease if revenue decreases -- which is also why ad-supported services prevail. If all players are subject to the same rules, that would either end up as a decrease in licensing costs or a focus on quality content over quantity. If they aren't producing exclusive content, they are beholden to the quality of the market. Either way, that should encourage quality content to be made over saturating the market with content.
Unfortunately, pipe dreams will remain pipe dreams.
Having legislators outlaw bad business practices is in general very slow; if competition works then it seems there should be a niche for a lump-sum/fixed commission-based dating service where they match you with the people in their database most likely to actually be compatible with you. But now that creates a new problem of measuring "successful" outcomes in matchmaking, which will be near-impossible to measure and easy for all parties to game, if it's mostly transacted by app. But it sounds in principle like the business model for traditional introduction-based matchmaking (the matchmaker only gets a good reputation if they have some successes, and most prospective customers will only be willing to pay $ for say 3-12 months).
EDIT: makes me wonder: eHarmony never opened matchmaking offices.
It works on Hulu too. You get a box at the beginning of the show saying "please turn off your ad blocker" but once you click OK it never comes up again.
And that’s why you can’t get a faster horse
There's a good planet money episode about the economy of gyms. Many really want members, not users. But members who never used would (eventually) cancel. So some had massage chairs in reception or free pizza slice tuesdays to keep the people who rarely came to work out feeling like they were still using the gym, forgetting it was just for a slice of pizza...
If there's nothing on netflix people will cancel netflix. So you want them to watch a few exclusive shows a year so they feel like they got their money's worth, while not actually costing netflix much.
But when I bought the full seasons it was from Apple. I’m sure Bezos still ended up with most of that money but at least some of it went to Apple instead.
No, that's not what the strategy is and they're quite open about it - the strategy is to maximize user consumption for every user, because that keeps them subscribed. I think a lot of people think that they use sophisticated analytics and machine learning etc to decide what to greenlight, but they don't. They use the judgment (and politics, and egos) of Hollywood studio executives (and often the same Hollywood execs that a few years ago were employed in "legacy" media). Although I will grant that they've been innovative in producing/distributing international content, this is really just globalization and labor arbitrage (it is cheaper produce content not in Hollywood, that's not news - they just spend the extra $$$ localizing international content to different global target distribution markets but again, this flow has happened forever, it's just typically been Hollywood -> localization -> foreign market rather than foreign production -> localization -> Anglophone market).
Where analytics and ML does come into play is deciding which things out of their enormous catalogue they push to individual users at any one time - that process is highly reactive, individualized, dynamic - that's why strange and seemingly random media become big hits on Netflix while being largely ignored by the commentariat, and vice versa, why series with dedicated fanbases don't get renewed (the analytics tell you that, despite the apparent success, further investment will not improve user engagement with the platform by enough to be worth the spend).
Except they don't. Only Netflix has a vague reminiscence of ML/analytics-driven recommendations. The rest of streaming platforms offer anything but personalisation, which is particularly bewildering considering the financial and engineering resources available to the streaming behemoths. I do not have subscriptions for each streaming platform out there, but out of the several ones I do, Disney+ and especially Prime are the worst offenders that throw random trash either into the home screen or into the «personalisation» section, e.g. «because you have watched The Expanse, we thought you would like an NBA season / rugby World Cup» and stuff like that. You would think that obsessively clicking the «Like» button after watching something you actually liked would influence the personalisation, except it does not. Disney+, again, fills up the home screen with garbage I would never fathom could even exist.
The thing is that with the currently available technology, building a capable (it does not have to be perfect) recommendation is not that hard. At work, we almost daily design and build solutions that employ semantic similarity search / something, and with the current crop of multimodal LLM's that can generate vector embeddings with ease, it is relatively easy to build out a recommendation engine or algorithm tailored for the needs of a specific streaming platform.
Granted, specific optimisations are required and there will be unique new challenges in there; however, crafting such a solution is well within the realm of possibility. And the amount of money required is not even that high considering that many building blocks are available as mature, managed services, or creating a bespoke and tailored in-house solution does not require starting off from the clean slate by leveraging the prior art. That was not the case, say, back in 2018, but in 2025 it is a reality. For a bizarre reason that is beyond my comprehension, almost no streaming platforms do that.
> […] that process is highly reactive, individualized, dynamic […]
That is the aspiration and the high ideal; however, something else is going on, and it is not entirely inconceivable that the marketing department is complicit in the foul play.
I have to go wash my mouth out now. Brb.
Some of these companies are trying to go for status now as well. They’re trying to strengthen their brands by picking up epic storylines and making them into the show everyone is watching. Only Netflix is chickenshit and they haven’t figured out that nobody watches the first season of a Netflix show until the second is announced because they know Netflix cancels shows all the fucking time. Which means Netflix cancels more shows because the numbers are terrible.
What they should be doing is test audiences. If those people hate it, then yes cancel. And be patient with everything else.
What's funny is that HBO is worse about that, but everyone watches the new HBO shows because they are big budget and look really appealing.
Netflix is also really bad about taking way too long to make additional seasons even if they announce them it's still forever before they come out.
This doesn't feel as true anymore. There's still the odd HBO blockbuster but they're producing a lot more garbage as they search for the next hit. And they're not immune to the Marvel approach of strip mining a profitable franchise well past there being any gold left.
Netflix shouldn't bother signing shows without a 2 year contract at this point.
Non sequitur. For the longest time, Netflix had no advertisements. Do they even now? (I don't subscribe... all their shows end up on my Plex anyway.)
IE had something like 90% market share back in the day because it was bundled with the OS and cost $0.
Chrome ate everyone's lunch because everyone was using google to search for stuff, and they could advertise their browser on their home page or together with their search results. They also took out ads, in some countries, on billboards, in newspapers and even in cinemas.
I'm sure technical people talking to their families had a small effect (though wouldn't they recommend firefox, because FOSS?), but I think that pales in comparison to google being able to advertise chrome on their search page.
That and it was such a better browsing experience. Firefox was not good compared to Chrome for years. I'm sure they are feature parity now, but for years the Chrome experience was significantly better.
As someone who lived through those days, that is just straight up not true. The only measurable advantage that Chrome had over Firefox was in Javascript performance, because V8 was superior to the JS engine built into Gecko before the SpiderMonkey project started.
Chrome won off mindshare, not off technical superiority. Everyone /assumes/ technical superiority because it's Google, but that's just not accurate. At best, you could count in Chrome's favor their early support for "web standards", because most of those standards were invented at Google, stuck into Chrome, and then only afterwards standardized so that others could make use of them. While the Chrome team at Google has done good work and an immense amount of work, they didn't start from nothing, Blink is a derivative of WebKit and didn't even diverge with the fork until 2013. Webkit itself didn't exist until 2001, when it was forked by Apple from KHTML (developed by the KDE team as a community project).
The story of Chrome is the story of "embrace, extend, extinguish" from the Microsoft playbook, done by an even more powerful and influential technology giant being played out. It is not the story of technological superiority, nor was there any strong technical reason why Google couldn't have contributed their work into the open without creating their own browser. Even with Chrome, other than the development of V8, they contributed all of their work back to WebKit until 2013 when they forked.
No surprise that Google regularly makes changes in its applications which advantage Chrome, penalize competing browsers, and still advertise Chrome on the front page of google.com, the most valuable ad real estate that exists anywhere.
As someone else who lived through those days, you're either misremembering or lying to yourself. As an end user, chrome was just better by any metric end users cared about. The fact that you're mentioning a bunch of stuff unrelated to things that end users care about leads me to believe that you aren't able to think objectively about that.
If the metric is mindshare, end user engagement, or anything "feely", of course they were ahead... that's the end result of Marketing. That's what Marketing does. They had front-and-center advertising on the most visited website in the world, with branding from the (at the time) most valuable tech company in the world.
FWIW, these are moving targets, browser teams across the board are constantly working on engine-side performance to make up for the complete lack of care from front-end developers as the JS community continues to churn through hype cycles, so that we aren't destroying batteries on dominant web devices (mobile phones and laptops). Mozilla has been maintaining public repeatable benchmarks for a very long time and continues to do so, although there isn't enough data available to go back in time ~10 years: https://arewefastyet.com/
This was pretty much entirely because of the JS performance advantage from V8 near the beginning.
> It could handle more tabs.
This was pretty much entirely because of the JS performance advantage from V8 near the beginning.
> It isolated tabs so if one crashed it didn't crash the whole browser.
This is definitely a win for Chrome and something we eventually saw Firefox adopt, but many many years later.
> Memory usage was lower.
This was a combination of factors, but heavily related to the improved JS performance due to V8. A big piece was also that XUL was a pig.
Thanks for pointing out some specific things, but while they affect specific perceptions, underneath the covers most of this had to do with the combination of improved JS performance in Chrome + a heavy reliance on JS for web.
Link Prefetching was in Firefox 1.0 and DNS Prefetching was added in Firefox 3.5. Both were supported in the first release of Chrome, but DNS Prefetching hadn't ratified as a standard yet. The first stable release of Chrome was on December 11th, 2008. Firefox 1.0 came out on November 9th, 2004 and Firefox 3.5 came out on June 30th, 2009. Firefox 2 (October 24, 2006) already had support for the control headers for DNS Prefetching, but the standard wasn't ratified until later, which is when Firefox brought it into support.
That's not to say that Chrome didn't have different approaches to predicting and triggering prefetching compared to Firefox, and that in some ways those methods were better, but both Link Prefetching and DNS Prefetching were ideas before Chrome exists, Link Prefetching was ratifed and in Firefox before Chrome existed, and DNS Prefetching was shipped in Firefox as soon as the standard was ratified (Chrome shipped it in the first release before the standards process had concluded).
You don't need a "set of metrics", you need to do a good job on the one thing people actually care about enough to switch.
Again, you obviously aren't able to objectively talk about end user experience for some reason and need to be honest with yourself about that. You should load up a VM with XP or Vista and Firefox 3.0 and refamiliarize yourself with the time period you claim to have lived through.
> You don't need marketing to tell you that it's a better experience when you could run them side by side and notice that one would crash far more often than the other, and one would struggle with lots of tabs and the other wouldn't, one would render pages faster and more accurately than the other.
As mentioned, I have run them side by side daily for a decade+, including for many long stretches of times both the stable and nightly builds of both. I /still/ to this day, use both browsers every single day. I have not seen anything which would make me believe that one is more stable than the other, or that absent the performance gains on heavy JS sites (early SPAs), that one had a particular advantage in tab-count/memory footprint compared to the other.
Almost all the performance differences were deeply tied to the JS engine, and actually still are (but now wasm too).
> Again, you obviously aren't able to objectively talk about end user experience for some reason and need to be honest with yourself about that. You should load up a VM with XP or Vista and Firefox 3.0 and refamiliarize yourself with the time period you claim to have lived through.
I might do that over the weekend for kicks and grins. I assure you, I am being honest and fairly objective.
It's funny how everyone is so certain I'm wrong, but provided no evidence, other than to point out things that are based /exactly/ on the one major technical win I acknowledged in my original comment and have completely ignored the very public benchmarking efforts that have gone on the entire lifecycle of Chrome.
You're replying to a post which claimed that Chrome was better than Firefox for years, with a rebuttal that claims Chrome was better than Firefox for years, but then Firefox improved. That doesn't change anything! Those early years from 2008 onward were critical for early adoption and gave Chrome inertia which it was able to ride to market dominance. I don't think any of your posts, while correct, have addressed that initial argument.
First, JavaScript performance was not an afterthought, it was a big deal.
Second, Chrome's sandbox was massively superior from a security point of view. In a world full of viruses, that was a big deal.
I personally recommended Chrome to family and friends. I did so because I didn't want to be tech support for their virus problems. But what I sold them on was the speed.
It's a /very/ big deal. It's not a mistake that V8 was chosen to build Node.JS on top of. Javascript performance continues to dominate the overall performance of browsers on the modern web as front-end developers utilize more and more JS weight in their pages and SPAs become even more commonplace.
Don't mistake my comment as saying that the win for Javascript performance wasn't a big win. V8 completely upended the expectations of both web developers and engine teams about what was not only expected but was what feasible when it came to JS performance. V8 is great, but it didn't need a new browser to ship it, which was my larger point.
> Second, Chrome's sandbox was massively superior from a security point of view. In a world full of viruses, that was a big deal.
Chrome's sandbox is not particularly better than Firefox's sandbox today. Both browsers invented new security concepts over the last decade+ as browsers have become larger, more integral to people's day to day workflows, and more security-sensitive. A modern browser in 2025 is easily as complex as a modern OS in 2025 with similar security implications.
When Chrome first came out, it had one major improvement over Firefox (and both were better than any alternatives for security) which was to run tab contexts in separate processes rather than separate threads. This opened up all sorts of opportunities and benefits, which Chrome capitalized on, proving this approach to be correct, and later Mozilla adopted it in Firefox as well. From a security perspective, the main benefit was to prevent different sites from sharing process memory context, in the event that the site was malicious and exploiting a browser bug to access process memory.
The modern Chrome sandbox (and Firefox sandbox) is magnitudes more advanced and complex than the sandboxing that Chrome initially shipped with, and at least to my recollection there was not a significant difference in security surface area between the two other than tab isolation at Chrome launch, which I don't really count as a "sandbox".
On the sandbox, I think that you are confusing the Chrome Sandbox (released in 2008) with the Privacy Sandbox (released in 2019). At the release of Chrome, it was a significant security improvement over existing browsers. You might not call their process isolation a sandbox, but they certainly did. See https://blog.chromium.org/2008/10/new-approach-to-browser-se... to verify.
True, security and sandboxing have improved greatly in the decades since. But the current quality of Firefox is irrelevant to people's reasons to switch back then.
Now let's go back to why Chrome was developed. As articles like https://www.computerworld.com/article/1501244/the-real-reaso... demonstrate, Google's reasoning was widely understood at the time. Google wanted complex web applications to run better. And Google also wanted people to not fear for the security of their web applications. So they focused on performance and security.
What Google didn't care about was creating a monopoly. Sure, they could have released V8 without a browser attached. But that wouldn't have changed the consumer experience in the way that Google cared about. That said, they had every reason to pull V8 out of Chrome and release it independently. They were as surprised as anyone when someone chose to create node.js out of it. Their actual goal was to hope that other browsers would use a better JS engine after one was shown to them. Or, if they failed to use it directly, they'd study it and copy its good tricks.
Now you claim that the fact that V8 could have been shipped on its own was part of some larger point. I have absolutely no idea what larger point that might be. But there was a significant period of time where Chrome had V8 and everything else was comparatively slow. Which speaks directly to my point that consumers had very good technical reasons to switch to Chrome.
It also had a much cleaner UI - that's why it was called "Chrome" in the first place, because it only had the chrome. You can see that these were true innovations because everyone else copied them.
1. It opened instantly. The others hung.
2. People can't conceive of this now but in that era if a rogue website started going crazy with Javascript it would CRASH THE ENTIRE BROWSER. In chrome it only killed the one tab. That sandboxing was game-changing for the state of the internet back then.
3. It could handle an obscene amount of tabs. The others couldn't.
4. 3 enabled a new mode that essentially didn't exist before - "reopen tabs". Tabbed browsing existed in Firefox but each tab was still so heavy to reopen that essentially nobody would expect to reopen their last tabs. With chrome the default was to reopen where you stopped.
5. Its built-in popup blocker actually worked. Yes, pop-up blockers existed before. And yet websites still found a way to work around it. Chrome's just worked. I don't know why they could do it but others couldn't, but at worst it would pop up a new tab next to your existing one. For others internet browsing was still an experience that ended closing a browser window with "oh shit there's been a porn popup window in the background this entire time". Not so with Chrome.
NONE of this came from marketing. ALL of this became apparent within seconds-to-minutes of using it. I only had to lead my friends and family to it, once they started using it they never ent back.
https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi...
My favorite quote ("Marl" is the hypothetical name for the marginal user):
> Marl’s tolerance for user interface complexity is zero. As far as you can tell he only has one working thumb, and the only thing that thumb can do is flick upwards in a repetitive, zombielike scrolling motion.
and it matters because this seems to be an omnipresent phenomenon.
everything everywhere seems driven by this unless someone with decision making power is executing a specific and conscious strategy that pushes back against it.
A very large portion of people actually cares about what they are searching for, and want the ability to ACTUALLY search and find that, with real parameters, not merely get some not-even-close stuff shoved onto their screen instead. That is NOT the serendipity of browsing the stacks in a great library.
A great example of failure is Amazon. I run a small design & manufacturing business, and years ago started getting pestered by Amazon about "Amazon Business" trying to supply both office staples and parts to businesses. This was an area that had enormous potential. Yet, they have entirely failed. I've never bought a single item, and it has faded.
Their primary competitor is McMaster-Carr [0] who does it right. Well-defined categories of everything, and highly specific search capabilities, at reasonable but not bargain prices. EVERYTHING you might search for is fully parameterized in every dimension and feature. Min/max/exact, width/depth/height/thread/diameter/material/containerType/etc./etc./etc. appropriate for each type of product. The key is McMaster DOES NOT WASTE MY TIME. I can go there, quickly find what I want or determine that they don't have it, and get on with my day.
The smaller company that does it right is still beating the tech giant a decade later. Same for other similar suppliers who actually have a clue about what their customers really want.
They continue to prevail over tech giants and VC-funded sites BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT STUPID.
It would be nice if the tech/vc crowd would also stop being stupid. They started out not stupid, but they really lose the plot when they think a few extra eyeballs this week will really win in the long run. At least provide two modes, a strict and serious search and their new messy UI. But they are stupid and this will not happen. Enshittification rules the day.
The thing that really pissed me off about Amazon Business is that they bought Small Parts and killed it off. Small Parts was a tiny version of McMaster-Carr that specialized in fasteners, small diameter fluid handling, short sections of specialty materials, and in general, quality "small parts."
If I bought directly from Small Parts, I knew I'd get exactly what I wanted. Ordering from Amazon Business? A complete crapshoot. Going to www.smallparts.com now just redirects to an Amazon 404 page!
[/rant]
I mean the answer has to be "they make more money this way" but for me it's means I groan internally before going to Amazon because finding the product I want will be almost impossible - it's even hard if I already visited and already found what I wanted to buy, finding it again, near impossible. Not even basics like search by product manufacturer actually work.
Sites with usable search are a relative joy.
I don't use amazon, but I use AWS every day of my life and I see similar-ish decisions made there in the console UI (although admittedly it has gotten a little better) - like, why are you seemingly making this purposely difficult? There's no way this benefits you.
THIS is what I really do not get.
Of course N=[small_numbers_somewhat_selective], but I have never encountered anyone who wanted anything other than good search. I have only ever heard complaints about the messy Amazon-style searches. In decades I have NEVER heard or seen a written comment about someone finding something great that 'just popped up' in an otherwise failed search. No one likes sloppy search or finds it anything but a waste of time and actually drives them away from the site.
Yet, clearly the search-enshittifiers have some data or usage pattern information indicating it works for them, or they wouldn't keep doing it. Does anyone know what this data might be?
I also don't know why they couldn't do both. Present the sloppy-search but have a small button to switch over to strict search (or even better, a McMaster-style search). I fail to see how that wouldn't be better, since I and everyone I know now actively work avoid Amazon and the like rather than work to try to find stuff in their shitty search. I came originally because it was easy to find stuff. Now, it is hard so I'm elsewhere
there have been many e-commerce players that have come in to the gap there and specialize in these “niche” products or services that deliver fast as Amazon and it isn’t hard to do so if you’re willing to invest. i would not personally be surprised if amazon saw long term growth loss in their e-commerce sector, especially given the competetion from other retailers that have adjusted - like walmart and target.
That would make sense as to why they insist on making search worse — keep you in the doom loop to show more promoted products and collect more pennies from the promotion, even if you end up going and purchasing somewhere else. Same Prime subscriptions, as long as they keep you coming back just enough to keep re-subscribing, they collect $130 or whatever per year.
I had noticed a while ago I was using Amazon in a way analogous to 'showrooming'. When Amazon came on the scene, people would look in the brick&mortar stores to see what goods they liked, then buy cheaper on Amazon. I had now unconsciously started using Amazon to do a broad survey search before purchasing somewhere else. OFC, when their search tool really enshittified, haven't been there much.
My secret suspicion is that AWS wants everyone to use APIs and deliberately enshittify's the console
As long as Netflix was successfully reading the author’s mind, they were satisfied with the experience. However, Netflix assumed that they want to keep watching the same content, oblivious to the author’s desire to discover something entirely new. Netflix failed to meet the expectations of those seeking something entirely different.
I can understand why Netflix made this change. They’ve replaced many shows with their own in-house productions. By doing so, they prevent users from searching for specific shows and then realizing that Netflix doesn’t have them. If this happens frequently, they risk losing customers.
On the other hand, Spotify doesn’t face this issue. Therefore, I’m puzzled by why they’ve made it more challenging to explore content by categories. (Disclaimer: I don’t use Spotify, so my experience is based solely on author’s observations.)
I think this is a great nuance that is often overlooked when discussing this.
I think the big difference is that nobody is going to pay $10m for a web service or browser.
There are systems out there that can do AB/CD testing and those do a better job of finding pairs of changed that have compounding effects.
You cannot A/B test your way from chocolate and peanut butter to cherry and vanilla. So we get to deal with tone deaf companies who feel their analytics are proving that customers either don’t know what they want or are lying about what they want. But that’s not something A/B testing can prove. It takes more sophisticated experiments than that.
Once you become a bloated monopolist like the three companies you just mentioned, your distribution strategy is solved in other ways (like, you've done some bundling and some acquisitions, maybe pressured a few companies into exclusivity agreements and are probably breaking some anti-trust law or other but you have lawyers). Then you don't care about the experts, PR or niches anymore, and you serve up slop. When the analytics recommend slop you go with the analytics, when they don't you ignore them.
None of this is to discount your insightful comment, just saying once you're big enough, your strategy is just doing tricky distribution deals, really (a fact no record executive would dispute).
The Nash Equilibrium of streaming UIs is a TikTok experience.
:-(
That's the issue, it seems like it really is the most profitable way to do things. Everything sucks now because shooting brainrot and advertisements at our eyes and ears is more profitable than actually giving us what we want.
porsche and lambo didn't see the outsized success they have now (financially) until they started pumping out SUVs. hell, the purosangue was made precisely to capitalize on that boring market segment.
i feel there's a little suvivorship bias at play here. i think the important thing is to not forget your enthusiasts perhaps, but a lot of these "successes" wouldn't even be around were it not for appealing to the greater masses. ofc some market segments fare better and you can build a business around enthusiasts.
It's probably profitable in a lot of cases to follow those metrics, shovelware content is cheaper to produce, and since the median user pays the same subscription fee as the enthusiast, you get better margins producing slop for the uncaring masses.
You need enthusiast businesses owners to produce quality product.
Damn, I never thought of this before, but it explains so much!
This is so spot on. I was a long-time serial entrepreneur who spent a couple decades across three successful startups discovering, shipping and growing new categories of tech products primarily for consumer, prosumer and hobbyists. Then I sold my last startup to a very large F500 silicon valley tech leader and ended up a senior product exec there. While there were a lot of positives like more mature engineering processes, testing and devops as a discipline, the exact issue you describe was a nightmare of product-damaging mistakes I called "analytics abuse." In my startups I valued having increasingly robust analytics over the years. In part because they helped increase my overall understanding of usage but mostly because they provoked good questions to explore. That exploration happened naturally because as the "product guy / founder" I never stopped spending a lot of time with our most passionate, opinionated, thought-leading customers. Over years of iteration I'd learned how to engage deeply and listen carefully to input from these customers. This involved interpreting, filtering and curating the mess of divergent personal preferences and pet feature ideas to tease out the more actionable product signals that could increase broad usage, adoption and passion around our products. I'd then bring those curated signals back to the product teams for evaluation and prioritization.
At BigCo they were diligent about meeting with customers, in fact they had entire processes around it, but their rigorous structures and meeting agendas often got in the way of just directly engaging and actively listening. Worse, the customer meetings the more senior product decision makers actually attended in person were mostly with the highest revenue customers. Junior PMs (and sometimes new grads) were delegated to meeting with the broader base of customers and filing reports. Those reports were then aggregated by ever-helpful program managers into tables of data and, eventually, slides - losing all nuance and any ability to spot an emerging outlier signal and tug on that thread to see where it goes.
I tried to convince everyone that we were missing important customer signals, especially from our smartest, most committed users. Being only one level removed from the CEO and quite credible based on prior success, I was definitely heard and most people agreed there was something being lost but no one could suggest a way to modify what we were doing that could scale across dozens of major products and hundreds of product managers, designers, execs and other stakeholders. In my experience, this general problem is why large companies, even the most well-run, successful ones full of smart people trying their best, end up gradually nerfing the deeper appeal in their own products. Frustratingly, almost every small, single step in that long slide pushes some short-term metric upward but the cumulative effect is the product loses another tiny piece of the soul that made our most evangelistic, thought-leading customers love the product and promote it widely. Ultimately, I ended up constantly arguing we should forego the uplift from some small, easy-to-prove, metric-chasing change to preserve some cumulative whole most people in the org weren't fully convinced even existed. It was exhausting. And there's no fighting the tide of people incentivized on narrow KPIs come bonus season.
I'm sorry to report I never found a solution to this problem, despite my best efforts over several years. I think it's just fundamental. Eventually I just told friends, "It's a genetic problem that's, sadly, endemic to the breed" (the 'breed' being well-run, very large tech companies with the smartest product people HR can hire at sufficient scale). Even if I was anointed CEO, given the size of the product matrix, I could only have personally driven a handful of products. I do think codifying premises and principles from the CEO level can help but it still gets diluted as the number of products, people and processes scales.
I'm groping towards something vaguely ombudsman-y, or WW2 production/logistics trouble shooters. Or maybe even pre-Bush41 ARPA Project Managers - term-limited person-with-a-checkbook and few accountability constraints.
If one accepts this role has to be out-of-band, vs poking big hairy blob in hope of creating and maintaining signal channels with particular properties, and grants CEO-adjacent leverage, then it seems a remaining unresolved challenge is integrating the output signals at scale? If so, maybe (jest) CA granted KPI offsets?
Top Down
* Start with clear CEO buy-in supporting a clear manifesto. Include some case study-ish examples of how short-term metric-chasing can go wrong. Do education sessions around this across the product and design orgs. Socialize the concept of "Enshittification." Get people sharing their own examples, whether how Google Search used to be good or how they used to be able to find stuff on Amazon but now the fucking search doesn't even work with quotes or exclusion like it used to. Actually show how you can't find a specifically narrow type of product by excluding features. Ask "How did smart, good people slowly slide down a slippery slope to a pretty evil place?" Discuss how your org can avoid the same fate (or if it even should). Goal: Create awareness. Win (some) hearts and minds.
* Radical idea: seize control of all granular analytics data. Yes, I'm suggesting that product teams cannot directly access their own raw analytics data anymore until it's been corrected for short-term bias and to re-weight by user type. Nor can they unilaterally add new analytics to their product until your CA org has vetted that even gathering that new data won't inappropriately bias internal perception. Before distribution to product teams, granular usage data is first recast and contextualized into new user-type and time horizon buckets that make it hard to chase (or even see) lowest-common denominator "bad" product changes.
I think this is hugely important. I saw certain savvy PMs cleverly manipulate how analytics were tallied and also suggest new measures in a veiled effort to boost short-term incremental metric gains, almost always in the quarter before bonus season. I also saw designers who were heavily bought into the "less density, less choices" zen ethos I called "The Church of Saint Johnny Ive" (which seems to pathologically despise advanced and power users), actively weaponize analytics to generate data supporting their religiously-held worldview and force killing significant functionality beloved by smaller advanced user segments. If those designers ran Burger King the slogan would have to change to "Have it MY way (because I graduated from Stanford D-School and know what you should want)". If you don't seize control of the raw usage data so it can't be weaponized for KPIs (or religious agendas), you'll never be able to make serious traction. Also, doing this will trigger World War III and you'll find out right away if senior leadership is really committed to supporting you. :-)
* Create new segmentation categories of user types. For example, use in-product behavior to identify power users who are passionate and engaged (discount daily frequency and session time / amplify usage depth of specific advanced features), Identify long-time users who were early adopters and dramatically amplify their analytics signal. Every click they make should be worth hundreds of drive-by, newbie users who barely understand the entire product yet.
* Create KPI demerits for teams who make changes that annoy or dismay long-term users as measured by posts on user forums, social media and in deep interviews of unhappy or exiting customers. A handful of such posts should be able to wipe out the gains of a hundred incremental pixel-moving tweaks. Causing strong negative feedback from thoughtful users who care should be feared like touching the third-rail.
* On that topic, once you have control of the granular usage data, simply aggregate all small increases or decreases into one big bucket that's only released into the overall number on a time-delay, maybe even once a year right after KPI/bonus season. Make it so no one thinks they can get "get there" by optimizing 0.1% at a time. All the tweaking of shades of color or moving shit 4 pixels is a distraction at best and at worst ends up losing the beating heart that engages users who really give a shit about the overall experience.
* Assign a tangible economic cost to teams removing a long-time feature. Of course they always have analytics which say "not enough users use it." Institutionalize an organizational default position that's extremely skeptical of removing or moving (aka burying) stuff that's been there since the product's "boost" growth that made it what it is. That shit's grandfathered in and is "don't touch" unless they've got an overwhelming case and a senior product owner ready to make a career-betting stand over it.
* Overall, adjust the KPI/metrics economy through targeted inflation and devaluation of the currency to focus on longer-term objectives.
Bottom Up
* I like your KPI offsets idea.
* Also create a way of rewarding doing more of the right stuff. Special awards not based on specific metrics but on overall "getting it" and making sincere creative efforts to try stuff that's not likely to pay-off near-term.
* Feature user feedback forums more so they get more use. Spiff teams that get more feedback as measured both by quantity and degree of depth. Add specific categories like "Hey, Put That Back!" to encourage that sort of feedback. Don't just count posts and up votes. Inflate the weight of long, passionate or angry posts and posts that elicit more written replies in addition to up votes. Apply appropriate discounts to frequent feedbackers and amplify feedback from people who signed up just to bitch about this one thing. Teams should fear making changes that cause long-time users who rarely post feedback to post emotional rants.
* Find those individuals in the product, design and engineering orgs who believe in valuing the depth of long-term user commitment as much as you do. Make common cause with them. Have a secret club and handshake if you have to but support them and elicit their 'outside-channels' feedback. They're your best source of warning when the forces of short-term darkness are coming in the night with pitchforks (and they will).
Good luck, friend. We're all counting on you!
... primarily for their price tag. There are a lot of enthusiasts for money in the world, much more than for driving at 200 mph.
> the change was driven by enthusiasts recommending the latest and greatest to their less-technically-inclined friends and family
It was never about recommendations. MSIE and Chrome were (and are, but with Edge Browser instead of MSIE) shoved into consumers' throats by ads, marketing, bundled distribution and outrageous lies.
I agree with that.
> but Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as desirable cars
I agree with that too.
> because the people who are into cars like those marques.
I think that is not true. I don’t care about cars. Never had one. Don’t even have a driving licence.
The reason why i think Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are desirable cars is because they look cool, and they sound cool. They were designed to be like that. If i see one on the street i notice it. I couldn’t care less about the opinion of gearheads. If a car would come out looking like my grandpa’s skoda, but all the car lovers would love it I wouldn’t even hear about it.
It is all about flashyness of the industrial design. And rarity of course.
There is a slight sifting of goalpost here. I was talking about being "understood as desirable cars". You are now talking about business success. They are not the same. Think of DeLorean. They are absolutely understood as desirable cars, and they very much went bankrupt.
> By that logic if you start making rare cool looking sportcars they would be automatically desirable.
Yep. I don't see anything problematic with that. I believe if you make a rare and cool looking sportcar people will recognise it as desirable. That's basically the definiton of "cool looking". If people (gearheads and regular folks alike) don't recognise it as desirable then you didn't made a cool looking car.
Which part do you disagree with here? I'm just thinking how we could test it. Imagine a car hot-or-not site. One where users have to "pick" which car is looking better or more desirable. The ultimate test would be to mix a few fictional sport car looking cars there. One which is completely made up so the gearheads could not have possibly approved it already. Do you think people would rate these fictional cars less desirable just because they doesn't exist? If you think this is suitable to answer our disagreement we could set this experiment up.
I mean to be widely desirable car requires some business success first.
> Do you think people would rate these fictional cars less desirable just because they doesn't exist?
Yes. You must be a rare carhead to judge the whole thing from just the outside and engine sound. The rest of normal people know they cannot and use reputation as proxy. I don't think it needs proving..,
Which I'm not. This is my point. I do not know of the reputation of Porsche. If you tell me they are shitty cars I would shrug and believe you. I do not even recognise the brand of a car. I see flashy car, bright colours, fast looking body, deep bone-shaking engine sound and I conclude "wow, that's a cool car". This is based on how it sounds and looks. Since I don't know anything about the reputation of the car it cannot be based on that.
If you are a carhead maybe you are mistaken about how regular people judge these things.
> I don't think it needs proving..,
Sounds like we disagree on how or why regular, not vehicle enthusiast, people recognise a car to be desirable. I proposed a test how we can figure out which one of ours theory is right. Do you agree in principle if people were to rate fictional cars as highly desirable that would show that reputation of the manufacturer is not what factors into that decision?
But if I see the same unknown brand car 10x in a day and then I see it in a videogame etc. and it's expensive so many carheads spend a bunch of money on it = endorsement, it's no longer unknown brand.
Same for everything, phones, cameras, whatever. You gotta be discerning to appreciate beyond the brand and most people are not.
If I see a cute car I check what's the brand, how much it costs etc and THEN I can think "yeah I want this cool looking car". I don't think anyone would use just cute shape of a car seen once as a justification for buying it.
Fast body? That means you must be a carhead. How do I know it's a fast body? Why would I even need a fast body?
I promise it is NOT always a good idea to follow the enthusiasts, because they are not at all like everyone else who uses your thing. Following them will skew your decisions—unless they are your entire customer base, so, have at it.
This article imo is complaining about the effect of middle management product owners at large companies. There are two dynamics that both converge on enshittification:
1. These product managers (or product designers) are early in their careers and want to make a splash. They are given lower priority projects but try to break out by making them bigger, better, more non-horse-like. They over-design and over-complicate the solutions as a result, because they don’t yet know when the right solution is just a refinement of what’s tried and true. They are incentivized to do this because they want to break out of the mold.
2. The managers above them, or a layer or two above depending on company size, are risk AVERSE. They are tasked with delivering results regularly and consistently. If you have the innovation bug or are creative at this layer, you get moved onto projects where this is required, which is not most of them. Overcomplicated is fine sometimes with you but WEIRD is absolutely not okay (the stuff that actually could be innovative), and no one gets fired for following The Metrics.
These two incentives clash to create overcomplicated but functionally poor products that aren’t helping anybody out. A healthy skepticism of complication and a healthy skepticism of engagement as the sole metric (or metrics in general) is necessary to make good shit. Sometimes it is actually understanding and using things as an enthusiast would, but you need to bring in an understanding of how the rest of your users are distinctly different from the enthusiasts, too. Using your thing yourself and actually following your own subtler feelings is what produces really useful innovation, slowly and surely over time.
I think that's a self-dellusion many tech enthusiasts have, that they're somehow trend-setters.
And then the same enthusiasts say for the original iPod "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame", and see the masses jump to buy it, and themselves only catch up later.
Or they see the masses never caring for their e.g. desktop Linux, whose mass dominance (not mere "works for me" or "have set it up for my elderly parents and they don't even know it's not Windows") would come "any day now" for the last 30 years...
Trend-setters exist, but they're a different group than the "tiny minority" of enthusiasts. More like some musician paid to spot Beats headphones, or some cool dude sporting some gadget early on.
>For example, very few people have any real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH, but Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as desirable cars, because the people who are into cars like those marques.
A hell of a lot of people had a real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH, if they could have the chance. And even more admired Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches because of their design and elegance (and price, people aspire to luxury goods, even when they can't afford them), not because some sport-car afficionados said so.
It's the same in other areas: the popular books, or comics, or movies, or music, etc. are rarely if ever what the "inner" crowd of each niche admires. Most people buy Reacher and such, not Finnegan's Wake.
>So if you develop your product by following your analytics, you'll inevitably converge on something that just shoves content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase, because that's what the median user of any given service wants.
More likely, if you want to keep and continue increasing your margins, and your stock price, you'll incrementally continue to shit all over your product trying to squeeze ever more money.
Neither the "enthusiasts"/tech-savvy users NOR the "median user" wants Netflix to be the shit it has become, or Google search to be so fucked up, or ads and nags on Windows UI, and so on.
They're just given those, and they accept them having no recourse. The moment there's a better recourse, they jump to it (like IE -> Firefox -> Chrome, or BS early search engines -> Altavista -> Google).
That risk (losing all content and facing extinction) is what pushed Netflix in the direction of being a content-producer, rather than a content aggregator. I agree with everyone's points on the influence of the median user in diluting the quality of the content Netflix produces, but that's not the only forced that pushed us here. Spotify faced a similar crossroads and decided to broaden beyond music once they started losing bidding wars for licensing.
Being a faster horse wasn't an option available to either Netflix or Spotify; there is no path for a 'better 2012 version of netflix or spotify' in 2025. They each had to change species or die, and they chose to keep living.
I wasn't aware that Spotify lacked much in the way of mainstream western music.
Are they having licensing issues?
Personally, this is the top contender for a reason for me to switch away from Spotify.
I know they have playlists, but I was looking more of the feature like, “these are all the songs I’m interested in, that I will use to build my playlists or shuffle… because I don’t want to try and remember everything as I wade through a 60m track library of all the songs available on Spotify.”
If you like a song on Spotify it just adds it to the massive playlist. It only adds it to its library management thing if you like the Album. If you click an artist in your library it takes you to their main page rather than to your library of saved songs by them.
You can save albums to the library by opening the album page and clicking the circled-plus "Save to Your Library" button. It then appears in your library under "Albums". You can search the library, sort by recently played, recently added, alphabetical, creator. You can also save singles, playlists, podcasts and artists to your library. If you go into settings, you can connect your library to locally stored files.
I could go on. This took me literally 1 minute of opening up Spotify and looking at the UI.
> To add something to Your Library:
> - Click Like on any song, album, or playlist to save to your Liked Songs playlist
> - Click 3 horizontal dots on any song or album to add them to a new or existing playlist
> - Click FOLLOW on any artist, podcast or show
So the “Library” is a proxy for artists I follow, songs in a playlist, or songs I like.
I find that confusing and it’s not really what I want. For example, there are songs I wouldn’t say I like enough to click the heart on them, as I wouldn’t want them inflicting my recommendations, but I might still want them in my library for easy access. Others I might like well enough without loving them.
The alternative would be to make playlists where I just throw stuff for storage, which seems like a messy way to managing things.
Then the followed artists seem like a wrench in the whole system, as it’s a totally different concept.
For mobile it mentions the + to add to Library, without mentioning the 3 bullets for doing it on the desktop/web. Why would mobile have a completely different mechanic for managing the library than the web, when it’s managing the same collection for the user? That also makes 0 sense.
Spotify hides the ability to just have your own stuff in favor of their algorithm they want to shove down your throat. It isn't just library management, but every part of their UI feels more like algo-driven exploration and recommendations as opposed to 'I'm in the drivers seat, and I decide when I want to explore'.
Its so frustrating, and I find it hard to explain to folks who have never had their own music collection finely curated - whether physical, in mp3s carefully renamed and organized (probably to be played thru winamp), or now in something like Roon or Apple music or one of the winamp-like local music apps.
Don't get me wrong, I've discovered great stuff via the various algo-radio things every service offers now and auto-plays if your queue ends. But I find much more great music via friends or music sites or reddit. And I want to be in the drivers seat when choosing music - starting with things I've added or favorited or added to playlists.
Anytime I have to use Spotify (typically to share w/ friends) its clear their product is all about _them_ and the stuff they want to push, and not about me.
Did they, though? 2025 Netflix is extremely close to having a worse UX than piracy, and it's already far more expensive. Are people going to pay a fortune for Netflix when their handy nephew can hook them up to his far superior Jellyfin instance for a sixpack of beer?
It's a tragedy of the commons, really. The whole value is in having a complete catalogue available for the casual viewer, and making $10-$20 from someone wanting to watch a random decade-old movie twice a month or so. Break up that catalogue into twenty different services each charging $15, and that same casual viewer isn't going to subscribe to a single one of them.
If the streaming industry doesn't get its shit together they are either going to lose viewers to piracy, or to a completely different medium.
Netflix I understand much less. They make money from subscriptions. If you perceive having a fantastic experience on the site by just going there, finding something you enjoy watching, and leaving... they win. Why they would foster a doom-scrolling experience I really can't really explain, other than imagining some dark pattern like they have to pay per view and want you to watch C grade movies? More time spent looking for something to watch means less time streaming?
I don't get it.
Tbh I don't mind the previews as long as they don't make the UI lag*. I was just pointing out that they don't save bandwidth.
* I'm also aware that they're blatant lies and have little connection with what's in the actual movie.
And he is a semi popular tech YouTuber that has risen to popularity in the last couple of years. I think he also streams on twitch but I’m not on that site so I can’t say. But he worked for Netflix for about 10 years.
or, if you're presented with more random 'clips' or movie snippets, this turns on your gambling reward center. It's like a slot machine - where you "win" by finding a good series to watch after searching. And because this is random, you end up getting addicted to looking thru the list/snippet, trying to encounter a perfect series to watch.
1. Cutting costs on the other side.
Studios don't want to license content to Netflix now that they are direct competitors, so Netflix has fewer and fewer movies and shows that they didn't produce themselves. And they want to spend as little as possible on producing their own content.
That way they make as much profit from the subscriptions as they can.
2. Reducing the value of competitors.
They are competing for user time. They want you to spend as many minutes as possible on Netflix because any minute not spent their is a minute you might be spending on Hulu or Apple TV. At the end of the month when you decide that you can't afford that many streaming services and decide to cut one, you'll pick based on which one you use the most. They don't want that to be the other guy.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NFLX/netflix/net-i...
Maybe it is winning despite what Netflix leaders are choosing to do, and maybe their choices will cause them to falter soon. And maybe Netflix could be doing better than they are. But it is always easier to pontificate than execute.
I don’t buy Netflix solely because they don’t integrate with the search in the iOS/macOS TV app.
Unfortunately, based on media trends before streaming and Netflix was a thing, lots of people like C grade productions. If you recall, “reality” TV shows were taking over in the 2000s. People like the Tiktok-ificiation (or otherwise lowering of quality).
https://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-traffic-increases-40-in-...
Because regardless of whether or not the business model depends upon it, investors have been trained that “engagement” is inherently good quality for their investments to have. Increase engagement, stonk price go up.
Then investors transposed that proxy to non ad-tention businesses, driving up engagement-rich stocks in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
www.linkedin.com##main[aria-label="Main Feed"] .scaffold-finite-scroll__contentOf course, such a feed would take me 2 minutes per week to read through so that wouldn't be good for the business.
Attention destroying apps reduce the long term focus and reward centers such that doom-scrolling through the catalog probably feels better than just watching something. Most of the folks I know who start a movie or show immediately pull out their phones anyway to scroll elsewhere.
That's depends on your definition of "want". They might not want to on, but their monkey brain does.
Because my netflix subscription is cancelled specifically because the "Finding something I want to watch drains my energy" phenomenon. Gradually over the course of like a year I got more and more frustrated with being suggested things, and not having a good way to find things.
Apple TV is the worst, because it dumps you right into the program, and you have to back out in order to get more information.
They all just want me to trust them that I'll love it. I end up having to pull up reviews on my phone.
I quit all those platforms recently and I'm not missing the frustration of having to 'switch channels' through their incomprehensible categories and views anymore.
You can't provide a seamless UX for turning on the TV and watching The Office if you don't own the rights to The Office. They want to habituate you to scrolling through content Netflix actually owns and picking something, because it's apocalyptic for them if you ever treat the services as fungible content libraries that you hop between month-to-month.
So regardless of the state of their content library it's necessary future-proofing.
A short while ago, I noticed I only used Netflix to watch 2 classic comfort shows, and I started to doubt if it was worth a 2-classic-comfort-shows-as-a-service subscription. I tried looking through the catalog to see what else I was paying for and ended up cancelling my subscription.
Netflix does an amazing job in giving the impression that they have an endless library of top quality content, but in reality, it seems like it's only a handful good shows and some filler, but presented in a way that makes it look like there's way more than it actually is.
Whenever I physically can I buy DVDs or digital downloads.
I guess I just didn't understand the Netflix model - why would I want to rent something that I can just buy and have for life? Especially with the enshitification these days - it means I have to pay a massive amount of money (over 5 years say), for a shitty experience, ending up having nothing when I cancel the subscription? That's just a recurring bad deal, in my opinion.
Entertainment is a zero-sum market. More time spent doom scrolling means less time spent on another service, which probably reduces their churn (also, ads)
Many people will pay Netflix for years hardly watching content for months just because the convenience factor of not having to subscribe/unsubscribe when they know a new season of X will be out in the next year. It's wild to me, but people are lazy. So again, the more you keep them from actually watching the content and realizing they are "done", the longer they likely just keep their subscription active. Get them to add as much potential content they want to watch to a never ending backlog watch list.
They want to take the bargaining power from creators (and old IP owners).
They don't want the customers to search for a specific show. They want the customers to watch whatever is shown to them. This way Netflix will have tremendous power over show creators - if our algorithm doesn't favor you, it doesn't matter how good your show is or how much money you spend on marketing outside Netflix.
i get it, i hate what they've become too. i'd like to believe there's a world where paying for content is a better model than selling ads. but the reality is that every time netflix makes a decision that the internet gets angry about, their balance sheet looks better.
You can see how Sonos enshitified their interface and even with a user rebellion wouldn't back down, just as an example.
To keep the line going up, platforms have to appeal to wider and wider swaths of a population, eventually lapping at the shores of a population that really doesn't care or want this service. But if you can hook them with some dopamine in a 5-second video, or a quest to rediscover some neat thing that they saw two page-loads ago but is now mysteriously gone from the very same list it appeared in, then you've clawed one additional user into your metrics and the VCs give you a treat.
These people don't care about the service and they're the worst users to cater to, but everyone caters to them because they're the only ones left. Hence, TikTokization.
I finally know what to call these idiotic trends that I've learned to recognise but couldn't name.
The one that grind my gears the most has been Microsoft breaking decades-old Windows paradigms to cater for Linux-developers-on-Windows, which is a very marginal, even actively disinterested group. All this at the expense of the 99.9% of their loyal user base.
For example, VS Code had the opposite shortcut (literally with the arrow keys going in opposing directions) for "go back in search history" to every other editor ever made for Windows... but matching the Linux equivalent.
Similarly, they recently broke "cls" to match the broken(!) behaviour of "clear" in Linux because of basically just one or two Linux users complaining in a GitHub Issue ticket. Windows users weren't listened to, because they're already users, not potential new users.
[1] oh, what the hell!? pun unintended, but now at least the name makes sense
https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi...
What I don't get is at some point the marginal user increase for a change has got to be smaller than the number of customers you tick off and lose by changing things.
Is the idea that all services converge on the same N billion people target audience who wants something almost entirely unlike the initial product? I feel like "marginal" doesn't really capture this nuance if so.
Consumer apps at massive scale like TikTok and Netflix don't design for nerds like us, they design for the average person. Actually, they design for the average behavior of the average person.
And most people on this planet are more or less happy with whatever they're presented with because they don't care about technology.
And when you control what's presented to people, not they (and they don't care), you can push them to consume what you want them to consume.
I heard a YC group partner once that he's worked with a ton of delivery apps. Many of them start out as differentiated apps for ordering from the best "hole in the wall" places or the app for authentic foreign cuisines, only to discover that the best growth hack is getting McDonald's on the app, because that'll be your top seller, instantly.
Most people just do the default thing everyone does—and we're probably all like that in one aspect or another of our lives, and that's who many experiences are designed for.
At least McDonald's doesn't pretend.
I think this is a debatable statement. It could be true, but I am increasingly convinced that enshittification, TikTokification, AIfication, etc. is proceeding despite what the average person wants. Average does not mean gaping, uninspired idiot. I think people in general do notice that everything is broken, short-lived, watered down and ad-ridden. But what to do? When every company does it, voting with your wallet becomes practically impossible.
It's true that it's also increasingly easier to be presented with an average choice because everything is aggregated somewhere and will mostly converge on a few options.
To your other point, a lot of this is also on an indifference curve. I said what the average person wants, not what the average person is ecstatic about.
But most people don't spend time seeking out the best possible experience and go with the good enough experience they're presented with.
Nobody will ever describe McDonald's as a transcendental experience. But it's consistent (same everywhere) and everyone can agree on it (vs. convincing a group to order from a random Indian place).
On HN, we're obsessive weirdos who WILL seek out niche experiences (the interface of this very website is a case in point). But most people aren't.
But engagement maximization looks the same everywhere – it’s communicating with the amygdala of the user, not their consciousness. And in a way, everyone’s amygdala is kind of the same and generic (sugar foods, violence, rage bait, boobs, chock value etc). Products that are largely designed for higher consciousness are more varied, such as most books. But those drive less engagement.
The amygdala wants more of the same, and the prefrontal cortex seems to want variation. My view is that you can’t have the chocolate muffins and raw carrots on the same plate, or a bookshelf with both Dostoevsky and Playboy magazines. You have to compartmentalize to protect yourself from your own amygdala. Same goes for media. Even well meaning product managers will be completely fooled if they simply follow the metrics.
And part of the problem is that if somebody (TikTok) has the most engaging format possible (vertical short-form video) and you (Substack, Reddit, LinkedIn, etc.) don't, you're at a strict disadvantage. So you enable short-form video, boost it in the algorithm, etc. no matter if it's a fit with your product because people will watch it if it's put in front of them.
> My view is that you can’t have the chocolate muffins and raw carrots on the same plate, or a bookshelf with both Dostoevsky and Playboy magazines.
And the problem is that in media, the prefrontal cortex stuff will never make as much money as the amygdala stuff, so few platforms will survive by focusing on the prefrontal cortex stuff.
A big reason HN is still so cozy and surfaces cool articles and discussions is because YC doesn't have to monetize it or optimize for engagement.
But imagine trying to start HN today...
Reddit is a good example of what a monetized version could look like. It's a shell of its former self. NFT avatar customization, engagement achievements, ads in feed and comments, layers of friction to simplify the experience. Such a mess.
One can always do as in "The good place" show: put a bunch of hotties to talk about and play with moral philosophy. I think the show was somewhat evil in that approach, but at the same time, it was also morally sound...
Certainly, philosophy TikToks are better than "boyfriend caught cheating prank" TikToks, but to some degree the medium is the message. And the question is whether we want the message of "everything is a short video, everything has a simple explanation and you can always swipe away and something else will be provided for you"
They're generally designed for engagement. Nobody is particularly asking for this type of experience it's just that Tiktok has discovered the most addictive - eh hum, I mean engaging - experience thus far. So they're being copied.
Netflix is a little different though as if people open the app and always see the same top titles listed due to it being an alphabetical index, then they quickly think nothing new is ever there. Or, it's too hard to find. So they're tricking people into thinking there's a bunch of fresh/good content. There's also a cultural phenomenon where everyone discusses "what shows have you been watching lately?" so the Trending aspects of their recommendations is to help people get on board with the trend; and, to push momentum and create the trend too obviously.
In categories where neither is the case, you can usually find beautiful alternatives from indie makers or small businesses.
The issue with streaming and social media is that they represent 90%+ of our cultural narrative now, so it feels like there's no escape.
But otherwise, this interface is so much bat shit! Incredible to me that anyone can pretend to Product manager of something so badly designed and unergonomic.
The most important thing is "continue watching", that should be almost the first line, but no it is randomly spread at different levels. Some times you can't even find it, sometimes it lacks the movie that you were just watching and that reappears later.
It is very hard to find something to watch because they still show you the hundred of things that you saw already, or that old crappy movie that anyone saw ten times on tv, or things that you are not interested anyway.
And there is absolutely no way to filter to not be a frustrating experience.
In addition you have the asshole dark patterns like showing multiple times the same movie/series in a given category when you scroll.
My hypothesis is that they used to have a lot of great content, so that was their strength, and no they have very little valuable and recent content and as they don't want to be upfront about that, they use a lot of dark patterns to confuse you to still give the impression that they have an impressive catalog.
But that has the consequence of the user being frustrated, impossible to find something proper to watch, but still having to spend hours browsing in the app as you might think that the good thing exist but it is just you that can't find it.
Sooo much better.
This seems to be common among the streaming services. I can't imagine any reason other than they want to force people to see their other content.
The cost of maximizing "value" for the company to the nth degree degrades the customer experience once it exceeds a certain threshold.
It's greedy tunnel vision that makes the world worse for everyone in the long term.
At some point these apps are so user hostile that it's simply isn't worth subscribing to. Their margins on content are so low on an individual—effectively zero since a flat fee means ~infinite content—that the effect on their business is incredibly small. Especially for people who have subscribed for months but don't watch consistently.
For movies that are 5+ years old, some would say that the companies have made the vast majority of what they will and copyright is so out of control, bought by those same companies, that it's not bad faith to counter-balance it.
Not sure. These are arguments.
It'll do this even in VirtualBox, running about 20x snappier than the native host, which boggles my mind.
This is quite true for LLMs. They can do basic arithmetic, but they can also read problem statements in many diverse mathematical areas and describe what they're about, or make (right or wrong) suggestions on how they can be solved.
Classic AIs suffered the Frame problem, where some common-sense reasoning depended on facts not stated in the system logic.
Now, LLMs have largely solved the Frame problem. It turns out the solution was to compress large swathes of human knowledge in a way that can be accessed fast, so that the relevant parts of all that knowledge are activated when needed. Of course, this approach to flexibility will need lots of resources.
At least on most hardware. I have a shitty Dell laptop for work that's basically permanently thermally throttled... :(
Another point is that you can train a horse, or even eat it if in dire straits. You own that horse. I can't disable things I want to disable, and names, locations, and features change (or are removed) with no notice between minor version updates. I can't tell you the last time I built something for a new Mac, or wanted to.
I don't know MacOS today, and it certainly doesn't make me feel like I own my computer.
I'm less harsh about modern Windows because I view it as amends for Microsoft causing the bot/ransomware crisis of the last 15 years. Still not for me, but at least I neuter it into usefulness.
I use virtualisation for the rest.
Maybe I'll spin up an XP VirtualBox off the back of this thread just for old times' sake and see what happens.
When Ford was working on a car, people who wanted a faster horse could go to the horse store. There were reasonable alternatives to Ford's new method of transportation.
But here, you can't recreate Spotify from 2015. You'll never get the rights to play the music for users. Same with Netflix, you'll never get the rights to show the movies.
Same thing with Twitter, Facebook, etc. Even if you know exactly what content your user wants, you can't fetch it for them because it was posted in some other walled garden, and that wall stops you from competing.
If you want a faster horse, change the laws so that people can build faster horses and compete.
Spotify has almost anything I look for. Netflix I struggle to find anything of interest.
But I no longer find Spotify any good at finding new music, beyond manually looking through artist catalogues.
For context, try out Pandora's recommendations. They haven't improved, yet they're orders of magnitude better than Spotify. The songs are hand annotated for style, content, etc. As a result, they recommend truly new songs with regularity that truly match the vibe.
Compare with Spotify, where everything is based on statistical "people also listened to X". Everything converges on some pop form of whatever genre and songs you've listened to a lot. It'll play odd, out-of context songs from the same artist before it'll find you new artists. Sure they have a few manicured playlists, but its nothing compared to the value Pandora has provided for years.
Now they've decided to be what they call a "SuperApp". This goddamn super app has a Twitter-like thing inside of it, shopping, and literally dozens of other products. Some core banking features are now hard to find but more importantly I had quite a few issues with investments as well. People who work there also tell me about messy problems on the financial services bits. It's very clear to me that in trying to become everything, they've deprioritized the fundamental products they offer, which are those related to banking. I want to store money, send and receive it, invest it, and have access to credit. But the experience of using those features has become significantly worse as new verticals sprouted up.
I have an account with you guys too but haven't kept up with the developments at all. I do wonder what direction you're going in - particularly given the tech company valuation the US market has given ya.
(I don't expect you to reply to this)
Good for them that they want to save a few bucks on developers, but why do I have to give my payment info to the devil? It's a third party which has nothing to do with the payment itself, and the fact that some banks used to have their own tap-to-pay apps shows that it clearly isn't a technical requirement.
I'm curious to know the name of that digital bank.
Now, I feel like I am fighting against software most of the time, having to compete with someones vision for how I should be using their program, which is likely aimed at the least technically sophisticated user. Nothing wrong with allowing such users to use the software, but please retain the functionality and speed for the power users!
I loved my computer when I was a kid, now I only see flaws. I don't think software was flawless at the time, it's just that I became very keenly aware of its current issues because this is my field.
But I do think the GP has a point about the intentional friction and bullshit introduced into lots of modern software that wasn't even a twinkling in some CEOs eye way back when. Software has become adversarial to the user. Psychology has been weaponized to induce behaviors in users. Instead of users feeling utility and choice in using the software, they feel burdened, controlled. Or at least, I do. I try to make smart choices about what software I use to maintain my own volition.
These kinds of flaws are fundamentally different from the kinds of flaws in software from the past if only because of the order of magnitude increase of resources that can be mustered to accomplish it. And because they are exploitative.
How does one build or maintain a viable software business in a world where most people's software needs have been met? It's to pivot away from delivering value towards extracting value. Hence all the push towards cloud-based services instead of stadalone local programs. Online connectivity allows the developer to arbitrarily change the balance of value between them and the user, which is where the gross adversarial feeling of modern computing comes from. The computer is no longer serving you exclusively.
about and not about
Kids nowadays are suprisingly proficient and using phones and computers.
...because they just click "AGREE" to every popup. They sign up. They give away their phone number or their one email address or they do the subscription, then cancel it later (or forget). They enter their credit card because they don't have any money to take anyway.
It's one thing when the flaws are there because of the limitations of hardware (and you understand the reasoning behind it). It's very different when you know that limitations are artificially imposed on you for the sake of someone's profit.
And mind you, it certainly did exist back then - stuff like early DRM schemes with hardware keys etc. And I was just as annoyed by them.
If on the other hand I know that a flaw is a result of intentional, adversarial rent seeking behavior (eg ads in the search menu on Windows; introducing shitty UI design; dark patterns), my patience is non-existent.
Modern tech problem seems to land in the second category a lot more often than it did 15+ years ago. It is the environment that has changed, not me.
It will be interesting to see how these first decades of the millennium will be remembered.
I've even still got a streaming service I can do exploring on, since YouTube bundles one with Premium. I find it's a good thing I have my own collection though since it tracks my interests poorly.
I've gotten back into buying my own video too. I don't consume a ton of video and I dropped Netflix streaming a while ago because the delta between me marking something for the queue and actually getting to it was becoming routinely larger than the amount of time Netflix would still have the thing I wanted to see.
The problem is, I don't even see the second derivative on this trend turning, let alone the first. Metric-driven development, by its very nature, will take away every knob from you that you could conceivably use to drive their metrics lower. I think that's a reasonable approximation of the root cause of the reality observed in the OP. If you happen to agree with their metrics then hey, good times for you, but the odds of that are low since you're probably not looking to maximize the monetization they can extract from you as priority one.
Therefore, the only option is, get off metric-driven-development platforms. There is no alternative and will be even less of one as time goes on.
I suspect in the very long run this metric-driven development will eventually die off as all consumers come around to this realization one way or another and start turning to other alternatives, but it can easily be 5-10 years before there's enough of us for those "alternatives" to be able to survive in the market. Fortunately, MP3 players haven't gone anywhere. (Although it takes some searching to find ones that aren't also trying to match the streaming services and stick to old-school "play what you ask for and not anything else, unless you ask for shuffling or randomness explicitly".)
I can't tell you how much I miss removable storage
Think how many times you've searched for a specific film and it says "Content related to <thing that you actually wanted>".
I agree with you for Netflix.
However, Youtube's catalog is almost certainly larger today than it was a decade ago. Even if you could somehow weight by quality, I think it would be hard to argue that Youtube's content catalog has gotten worse. Maybe average quality per video has gone down, but there is so much content on Youtube nowadays, assuming you're able to find it.
I'm not sure about Spotify.
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
The key metric seems to be no longer how many users you can make sign up, but how can I keep an subscription running at lowest cost to serve possible.
The UHD price is not worth it for a long term subscription, and the HD quality is subpar.
If you ask a heroine user if they want to use, I suspect most will say no.
But if you A/B test their behavior and build a product based on what they actually do, you're going to start selling more heroin and encourage more heroin use.
To everyone's detriment.
That really hit the nail. Advertising industry along has ruined web! Everything is for trigger what action we want user to do on the page, how can we see what user is thinking.
Very creepy indeed from a user perspective. Now days I don't care if telementary is aggregated or open or if it helps developer makes better software.
How about NO telementary!!! NO tracking!!!
They left it alone for years but now they're converging them, looks like it's only a matter of time
Yep, Spotify keeps showing me podcasts right at the top, even though I've never listened to one on their platform ever. Sometimes with titles like "how we f**ed yesterday", while I keep it open on my work computer. It looks like they know better what I want!
Spotify is in a similar boat. The music companies didn't value streaming and were willing to sell their entire catalog to the one player in the ecosystem (or in the case of music, to everyone for the same low price)
But also, personalization actually drives a ton of revenue. When I worked at Netflix, when the recommendation system went down and we defaulted to curated lists, streaming would drop 20%. And that was in 2013. I can only imagine what the drop is today when that system goes down.
Personalization drives a ton of revenue, and TikTok is the best at it, so it's no surprise that OP sees everything "going to TikTok"
The Netflix changes aren't attempts to make their product better. They are attempts to save money by obscuring the amount and/or quality of available content.
By contrast, if you buy BluRays from one company and BluRay players from another company, everyones incentives are better aligned.
After getting annoyed by their interface that was showing 80% of content I have already seen, I've come to a realization:
Their incentive is not even to make me watch crap. No! Their best outcome for them is for me to watch nothing and still pay.
Showing me old shows gives me the warm feelings and make me associate them with Netflix, making me keep the subscription even
Hypnodrones are corporate dreams
Netflix et al are good for those high profile miniseries you want to watch once and then never again. The rest, download and enjoy without ads, without dark patterns, especially content that kids watch (youtube).
If I was a conspiracy theorist, I'd think that all these "content companies" are colluding in a mass "Taste Removal" campaign, deliberately getting users used to bland, vanilla, generic "content" so they can one day just shove AI slop at us all day and only people who were alive in the 90s would remember when movies and TV were great. The rest happily will watch Ow, My Balls and ads for Carl's Jr.
For those who don't, reading "Competing Against Luck" by Clayton Christensen will dramatically improve your ability to create successful products/services.
The analogy would be "I want to go back to the pre-ensh*ttified, simple version of X that we used to have. But with an updated web experience, or smartphone app, there's no way to go back. I have at least three apps on my phone that I wish I could still have the older version of. But I can't.
A very interesting development: in the Netherlands KPN, one of the largest telcos, introduced a feature where any household with several of their products in use (e.g., two cellphones and fiber internet) could choose a free 'gift'². The gift is a choice from a bunch of subscriptions, including Netflix, Disney+, and HBO Max. And you get to switch monthly if you want to. So we ditched our own Netflix subscription and started watching Disney+ for now. Perhaps we'll switch in a few months.
These services probably realise that their customers are made up of 'hoppers', and 'stackers' (people who take out multiple subscriptions to streaming services at once). I wonder what the distribution for each service is.
1: In part forced upon them by the content owners waking up and wanting to set up their own exclusive shops of course, and in part because of, well, greed (the UI suckiness).
2: The trade-off is obviously that this stimulates consumers to consolidate their telco products with them. In my case this was already so, so for me this is just a small incentive to stay with them (i.e., it saves me €9 a month).
But what they need is rolling releases across the whole year, so that once one production is "done", the next one rolls around.
(maybe they already do, I don't know, I'm just thinking of Stranger Things which seems to be Netflix' main seller at the moment)
There is an aphorism that with enough A/B testing every website turns into a porn app or a gambling app. I guess we’re observing something similar.
I'm by no means a conspiracy theorist, however as I've risen the ranks of my chosen technical field I see more and more that what George Carlin said was really poignant. "You don't need a formal conspiracy when incentives align"[0].
And incentives align really easily.
Every company has some form of market analysis going on. CEO's will be invited to rub shoulders with the same groups of people. Conglomerates will have information sharing of some kind across all subsidiaries.
Everyone is acting independently, but towards the same goal. It's actually quite shocking to have been part of (and hearing about) meetings between CEOs where "new information from CMK (consumer market knowledge) indicates that smaller dev teams all onsite are the best way to do things" - and everyone gets the same "information" at the same time, and thus the entire market moves in that direction, as if it was a fixed horse race and they were acting on a secret tip they heard from their uncle...
I'm a bit counter-culture in my missive, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt, but a little nudge across a limited population seems to be enough - and it exists.
Controversially: Blackrocks DEI initiatives are perfect public example of what I mean, no matter if you are pro or con, you can't deny the impact.
> It's actually quite shocking to have been part of (and hearing about) meetings between CEOs where "new information from CMK (consumer market knowledge) indicates that smaller dev teams all onsite are the best way to do things" - and everyone gets the same "information" at the same time, and thus the entire market moves in that direction, as if it was a fixed horse race and they were acting on a secret tip they heard from their uncle...
The same thing too when companies hire consultants to look at the "market wage" and then set salaries based on what the consultant said. Every worker at the same "market wage" with no incentives to be above that.
Today incentives align more easily. All these CEOs are in the same whatsapp group. That's how we got the RTO mandates from all CEOs at the same time. There was story here a year or two ago.
Given everything we've seen with kids and teenagers exposed to phones, social media, etc this is the next tobacco. Thank god there are countries already banning phones from schools and there's talk of banning minor from social media.
Ford wasn't interested in either your horse, or your transportation need. Ford was interested in what you'd buy. That means when there was ample competition, you'd likely get something that very much felt like a faster horse, because... you did want to go faster than your existing horse, and you didn't care the new thing wasn't horse-shaped.
Fast-forward until meaningful local competition is gone, and you get the F150, the Bronco, and the Mustang. It isn't really what you want (for most people, I know some of you love yours, moving on), but given the other choices, general availability, and popular sentiment, it's close enough that enough people will say, "OK, fine, definitely not a horse any more, but still sorta works for me."
You'll get bland pablum that's smeared out across the average opinion of a sufficient amount of people while maximizing total profit under the curve. That's the logical outcome of any mass production.
IOW: If you care about what you need, support open source authors. Write open source. And be prepared to tinker to tailor it to your needs. Horses are individual, and need care and support more than your car does.
To a point, until stage 3 enshittification hits, and the business claws back all the value.
The only question are people like me outliers that can be ignored - there will always be a few people you can't get. However I could be a sign of the end.
YouTube and LinkedIn are practically monopolies. Netflix isn't a monopoly in the same way but you usually don't have a choice of streaming services for watching a particular film or series so it's different from being able to buy the same cheese or the same wine from any of several different supermarkets.
For some reason (perhaps because it costs money to keep a large catalog?) Netflix retracted the long tail while Amazon at least kept theirs unfurled.
ahem. We have a solution for the monopoly part. We've had it since the 19th century. We just stopped enforcing it in the 70s and 80s when the Chicago School convinced everyone that as long as judge Robert Bork's "consumer welfare" can be trotted out to prove that the "free market" is working and prices are low.
For me, the cardinal sin of a streaming service is, if I open your service every single day and watch the next episode of ONE show, then the next time I open your service, PLEASE HAVE MY SHOW AT THE TOP OF THE HOME PAGE.
This is such a simple and obvious user journey, but the majority of streaming services, on purpose or not, fuck it up. The number of times I've opened a streaming service, scroll through the entire home page with the shitty tv remote, then had to type the name of my show manually in search. Makes me want to unsubscribe right then and there and just use Plex instead.
As I understand, licensing dynamics were the main reason for Netflix's change, not pure product design. In 2012, most movie studios licensed their catalog to Netflix, while 7 years later they took away the licensing to compete with proprietary walled streaming platforms. Due to the smaller catalog, Netflix could not design that open searchable streaming library; they changed their design to make the best of the more limited library.
In my bombastic opinion, Spotify has the _worst_ goddamn user interface of anything I have ever used, including my dishwasher with a single button. Netflix is less frustrating, but that's likely because "here are some films" is more acceptable than "here are some songs, but fuck you if want to listen by album".
Smashing content into my face isn't making me love you.
On LI I lost already like 3 articles that I really wanted to read but I clicked notification and I can never get that articles back.
I think what we must keep in mind with many modern products and services, especially popular ones, is that they are not becoming TikTok, they are becoming things competing for our attention in the most perverse ways possible. The potential to make these systems even more manipulative and exploitative is there, I see great potential for UX design that is even "worse" than what we already know.
Every entertainment platform becomes video centric.
Every discussion platform becomes political.
As someone who prefers text and static images and doesn't like politics, this is really bothering me right now.
Adding to the list: image-sharing platforms, Instagram, Pinterest and Imgur, are also Tiktok now, specially if you use the apps instead of the website.
Tumblr and Flickr somehow have resisted Tiktok-fication so far.
EDIT: perhaps it's time I make a utility that I could use to achieve these ends: https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/libimobiledevice
How do I copy music to my device?
Sorry, music synchronization with newer devices is currently not supported but if you are a keen developer why not contribute a new service implementation for the ATC Service?You have given every product team a set of parameters and asked them to optimize the product around those parameters. Namely, how much time and attention the user spends staring at your app. Is anyone surprised that convergence has taken place, when everyone is after the same thing, with the same tools, in the same environment?
The only question is: who is "you" in this scenario? Instinctively, it's the leadership team. But in one of my least popular takes, I tend to think the responsibility is ultimately "you", the user who refuses to stop scrolling. Tech leadership doesn't have vision or a moral compass, they take their direction from the metrics which ultimately measure your choices.
In this case, it's less "faster horse" and more "quit with the stupid fucking song and dance, and give me the damn thing I paid for without all this extra stupid bullshit that makes the experience worse."
On top of that, their recommendation algorithms are (were?) terrible compared to the other services (since then, they added more payola), and they're actively trying to burn down the last open corner of the internet (podcasts).
Also, the pricing is comparable, even if the other options feel more premium.
What am I missing?
I also pay for Youtube premium, but I can't even switch to that because their music player is even worse than Spotify.
I really miss the good old days of music players that were _packed_ with features. The players of current streaming services are so basic. And as long as I can't find a replacement that fits my needs I don't really want to bother switching.
For media library, I use Jellyfin and host all my media files locally on a NAS.
I self-host all my projects on that same NAS, which works just fine and and makes me not need to subscribe to some offer or other from hosting providers.
I quit SmugMug last year, because it turns out, hosting my photos on the NAS costs nothing, and remaking the small part of the SmugMug web interface that I need is trivial.
And for vehicles, I also made myself a faster horse, by bolting a Bafang motor on an ordinary mountain bike. Things break occasionally on that thing, but I know how to fix them, and so I do.
My crazy though is that this is where the internet will go.
One of the big problems with SaaS is that the apps are tuned to increase company profit - not user agency.
All that will flip. Agents are the first barrage in that direction but the movement is only just starting.
One barrier is configuration (code at scale) - ie a way to communicate exactly what you want.
Once we have that we compile from our needs (configuration) to an app thats exactly what we want backed by our accounts on amazon, uber, google, openai as databases and processing.
It's hard to say for sure if Netflix could have/should have kept going in the direction they were going in 2012. But they didn't seem to think so.
You can't necessarily count on businesses springing up to satisfy your personal interests and tastes. Especially large-scale businesses, which are always going to gravitate toward the center of large markets. It's great when it happens, but it's basically just luck when it does.
Could you maintain a profitable business and continue steady growth? Sure. Could you become a unicorn and IPO within the next 5 years? Unlikely.
That's because the money is concentrated into a few dumb people with limited capacity to invest it. So they'll push it into a handful of companies that will destroy whatever sustainable companies that exist on the same market.
Instagram. I have clicked through an ad, yes AN AD, and came back to get to another ad and had it refreshed away.
I hope they are doing this because it works for them, somehow.
PS: LinkedIn does this too.
I hate the Netflix interface enough that I prefer to watch movies other ways even though I have access to it.
They did it because it's more profitable to shovel slop than to distribute quality. Quality content is expensive to make. Slop isn't. The way you do that is by hypnotizing people with addiction. To do that you have to have control over what people see and use algorithms to optimize that to "maximize engagement." You need your users mindlessly scrolling, not searching and categorizing and exploring. You need to disengage the neocortex and engage the brain stem.
TikTok is being copied by everyone because they nailed this formula better than anyone. They didn't invent it, just perfected it. I'd say Meta/Facebook invented it, which is why Zuckerberg should be known as the man who destroyed the Internet.
The next step beyond TikTok is a 100% AI generated algorithmic feed. Drop the human creators entirely. Everyone gets a personalized feed of low-quality AI slop tuned for maximum engagement.
Addiction is the best business model.
So in a way Netflix had to learn how to push slop. Because they can't make their own Star Wars or MCU or Friends or whatever. It's just not easy to build a catalog of reliably-profitable franchises. Especially when many of those franchises were born decades before Netflix even existed.
Even the good stuff Netflix has (like say Black Mirror) isn't going to be enough to keep customers unless they get people watching some slop.
They could try. The budget for the first seasons of Friends was the same as any other sitcom of that era.
Sitcoms would be perfect for streaming companies but non of them seem to get that for some reason.
The second longest (by episode count) non-animated, scripted original series at Netflix is a sitcom, The Upshaws. I’m not aware of any streaming service that doesn't do original sitcoms.
I’m not convinced, though, that sitcoms are all that great a fit for streaming—I don't think any genre other than maybe talk shows has been more dependent for initial launch on pre-streaming broadcast/cable viewership habits and viewing block placement to catch people already watching already-successful similarly targeted shows.
https://videohubapp.com/ & https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
I hate YouTube Shorts with a passion. They are low-effort engagement bait. They cannot be disabled.
Even worse, my Google TV will not play them when my phone is connected to it, and my phone will not play them when it is connected to my TV. Both devices can play them fine, they just don’t want to play them when they are connected.
There can be no good technical reason for this. It’s just delivering a bad experience because it can.
https://www.reddit.com/r/revancedapp/comments/156lw72/the_be...
Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/unhook-remove-youtu...
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...
It's interesting that SV outwardly says it "wants to create entirely new markets instead of products in existing ones", meanwhile the actual experienced outcome for users is the same experience across multiple markets.
SV is somehow failing on both of its metrics here. It's creating entirely homogeneous products across all existing markets.
Usually their new bridge is modestly more convenient in some way, but opens the door to the worst kind of enshittification.
So they are finally here.
At most of these corporations, over time they've learned to be product and financially oriented, because it's what the markets reward and it's easy to do, rather than customer orientated, because as long as they're not unusably shit for the majority of their customers, then that's good enough.
It's an attempt to reverse backwards to the worst possible thing that works, because that gets you more ad revenue, rather than the best possible thing.
I say this as someone who's walked away from strategy consult gigs for multinationals where the objective was literally to do things like this. Revenue and margin maximisation in ways the stock market and PE/VC investment rewards is frequently orthogonal to building the best thing for the customer.
1. Make useful product for smart people
2. Change product to be useful for average people.
3. Change product to be handy for dumb people.
4. Let investors think even dumb people can rule the world.
5. Cash out.
They don't want you to think they're some static libraries of content. They make their websites like interactive billboards.
Not quite the point of the article, but Kawasaki recently announced the Coreleo, a (faster?) robot horse you can ride and holy shit I want one. No chance this thing sees the light of day, and the video is a CGI render, but oh man.
(This coupled with the tendency to hire more people as you get more popular, you have more people mutating the thing. Also novelty bias...)
A better, more constructive approach is to proactively identify how emerging technology can fit people's needs. And for sure, you need to verify that there is an actual need for what you are building, and then go build it.
Netflix and TikTok are not the "faster horse" here. Generative AI is clearly the "faster horse". It's a disruptive technology that will change the entire structure of society, much like the internal combustion engine. And no one said they wanted that either, that doesn't make people dumb, or user surveys pointless. Who is currently saying they want a "faster computer"?
Henry Ford saying that would probably be like hearing Sam Altman say "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster computer". It's not true, it doesn't match reality.
well... I definitely want more performance per watt. And I stress "performance", because more MIPS are useless if wasted.
(You do have to ignore the other features, but that doesn’t seem very hard.)
But Spotify is far better now than it was 10 years ago. I still have playlists, I can still instantly find any song I want. The added bonus is the discovery engine. So the UX now is a superset of what it was before.
It's not good by any conceivable metric other than those they have internally decided represent business goals. If you want to have a tautological argument that makes it good, because those goals are the only goals that matter. That's a boring response to an article about how business incentives have turned the UI into trash.
FFS the Play button frequently breaks requiring a refresh. And as much as I appreciate the inevitable response that I'm holding it wrong, how is that my problem?
and I want to use a buggy whip to smack the fingers of people reaching for their touchscreens to spring for the in-car-purchases and seat-warmer subscriptions
This line is especially silly when making B2B products, especially very expensive enterprise ones. It's often used to justify building "great ideas" from some exec or overzealous PM/engineer over concrete asks from customers. Like you really think that a team of 20 experienced people paying >$1M to help run their multi-billion dollar business, both have no idea what they actually want and don't understand the capabilities of new technologies in the market? Totally condescending.
I have seen it personally ... dozens? of times? Its the reasons startups can even succeed at all given the enormous momentum and cash reserves of these bigger companies - their goals, management, approach - it all becomes more diffuse and poorly executed.
I've also seen it a lot: sales person at a small tech startup convinces business person in large tech company to ignore their own engineers. I suspect most engineers at large firms have been on one side of this experience at somepoint, and most engineers at small but successful tech startups have been on the other side (lead engineer to sales: "You told them our our product could do _what?!_ That's fine. I never wanted my PTO anyway...:(")
External sales person says "oh you've been struggling with that for YEARS?!!?!?! We can get that done in 90 days if you can get that group of people on board" (3 years passes, everyone involved doesn't work there anymore, the project is a mess)
External sales person says "oh you've been struggling with that for YEARS?!!?!?! We can get that done in 90 days if you can get that group of people on board" (3 years passes, everyone involved doesn't work there anymore, the project is a mess)
You get the idea.
Knowing you've built the solution perfectly to the spec, whilst also knowing that the spec wasn't reviewed or endorsed by any technical people so the client's entire engineering team thinks you're incompetent, for just doing what their colleagues asked you to do...
But it doesn't even stop there. It goes down to the SMB market as well. Granted not the S but in Medium and larger places.
I have been dragged into multiple sales calls with the agenda "we need an app".
Full stop.
Fun day to be the "Solution Architect" on call.
"Recurring revenue stream" is an answer in search of problems, and it's ready to destroy all alternatives.
And the curse of "AI" and extensive machine learning. As if machine learning can adequately represents a person's tastes and preferences.
Tubi has a better exploration system and catalog than Netflix does but it’s still not as good as Netflix used to be.
Apparently the market disagrees.
Companies no longer have a target user. The target user is whoever can be juiced for as many pennies or eyeball-seconds as possible. There's no persona for user stories, it's "literally whoever we can get this in front of for as long as possible". It's about the lowest common denominator.
Which implies, these products are not "designed" anymore. "Designed" implies that the creator made choices to make the product better for a target user. But there's no target user. When your service has a billion users, it's not possible to design for _anyone_. Mouse traps aren't "designed" for the mice, they're built for the people who don't want mice around. Services aren't "designed" for a billion people to interact with, they're built for the owners to make as much money as possible.
I just want them to import a syntax highlighting library but instead they are pushing video content into my face
Every trip, I'm reminded of how disappointing Google Maps is. Simple things like trying to find a laptop-friendly cafe and getting random cafes represented by a close up picture of someone's cappuccino. Realising that I'm driving 10 kilometres to do a U-turn. Having no way to bypass a blocked road. The very clunky waypoint management. Aagh!
I want quality of life improvements more than I want new features. It's weird that a company with so much resources can't create powerful tools.
Part of the process of enshittification is changing the set of needs served by a product, and, almost invariably, adding new functionality that no one asked for and that they probably don't want. And usually that new functionality is a sort of Trojan horse (a faster Trojan horse?) that offers something superficially interesting but is really just a means of wedging some kind of revenue generation into the experience the user really wants to have.
People often do want cars rather than faster horses, but they want the cars they want, not the ones that will make someone else the most money.
The main problem here is that the systems are starting to look more and more alike every day. Systems that are oppressed by algorithms turn into a Hollywood porn star: they are just trying to show what they like the most. This makes the systems uniform by wiping out all other beautiful and valuable things.
Instead of really making a system better, we're trying to make it look like the most popular one available. As a result, we have copies with silicone lips, silicone breasts, plenty of aesthetics, but cheap and soulless. Instead of improving existing systems, we corrupt them by copying them.
It solves this salad media issue, recommending films based on your taste.
Bandcamp to me is the ideal “horse” for music (and I’m praying it stays a horse)
Those complaining about Chrome dominance but still not personally using Firefox is another example (even with all of Mozilla’s controversies, Firefox is still the “fastest horse” available imo)
Not being satisfied with the horse selection is understandable, but actively furthering the obsolescence of the available horses is not (even if the individual impact is minimal)
There's a tendency in consumer tech companies to look at TikTok as the ultimate goal: everyone wants a pipeline to pump entertainment slurry into, and the old versions of the product are just worse slurry pipelines. But this is wrong. Old Spotify and Netflix aren't "faster horses". They're the train connecting a walkable urban core that got replaced with a never-on-time bus route[1] while the government encouraged everyone to move into car-dependent suburban prisons.
Like cars, entertainment slurry pipelines exist for the benefit of the pipeline owner, not the creator nor the viewer. Nobody asks for TikTok, it's just a global minima in the reward function[2] of "how do we most actively exploit creative industry". The platform owners want you to forget about the artists on their platforms so that those artists can't tell you to move to another platform. It's akin to one of the nightmare scenarios trotted out by copyright maximalists during the Napster Wars of the early 2000s, except the owning class now has significant economic interest in the platforms, so it's OK now.
[0] I have a pet theory that cars were a fascist long-con to destroy cities and atomize society to avoid the creation of class solidarity and durable political movements against large business interests.
[1] Remember when Netflix rented DVDs? And had almost everything, because physical media has really robust consumer protections?
[2] If you think my "cars are fascist" theory is insane, wait until I talk about AI.
It solves this salad media issue, recommending films based on your taste.
Maybe it has been misappropriated in a culture obsessed with new ideas... But nothing in human-centered design circles (where this quote ostensibly originated) declares that new is always better.
I enjoyed your point and it would be nice to have the option for a more archival nerd UI to serve people like you and me. I'm sure if turning it on was buried in a configuration menu we wouldn't mind.
Maybe it has been misappropriated in a culture obsessed with new ideas... But nothing in human-centered design circles (where this quote ostensibly originated) declares that new is always better.
I enjoyed your point and it would be nice to have the option for a more archival nerd UI to serve people like you and me. I'm sure if turning it on was buried in a configuration menu we wouldn't mind.
Maybe it has been misappropriated in a culture obsessed with new ideas... But nothing in human-centered design circles (where this quote ostensibly originated) declares that new is always better.
I enjoyed your point and it would be nice to have the option for a more archival nerd UI to serve people like you and me. I'm sure if turning it on was buried in a configuration menu we wouldn't mind.
I can only guess that for some reason Amazon think they make more money by not making search work. Work, generally, like only actually returning things with the search term or, work specifically, like letting you specify hard drive sizes above 6TB.
But I find it hard to believe this shit horse actually drives sales. I always end up looking elsewhere in frustration.
Remember Google Reader?
What if I want a better Google Reader?!
* beats dead horse * ... sorry, horsey.
With Spotify, the point is that lots of people pay for it and it's popular. So good for them. Individuals wanting something else does not mean that it's worth for Spotify to build that. It might be worth for someone else to invest in such a thing. But judging from the lack of successful things in this space, probably not.