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Comment by flkiwi | Hacker News Reader

> finding products they love

That phrase is a dead giveaway that a very silly group of people have started dominating the conversation at a given company. I don't "love" a product. I certainly don't "love" a product I'm having to resort to ChatGPT to figure out my potential relationship with. At best, I "love" having a solution to a problem that I want to spend as little time and money solving as possible, and even then it's more of a satisfactorily productive comradeship.

God this is exhausting.

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Marketers are obsessed with this idea that people want some kind of "relationship" with them. As if I wake up in the morning, hoping to interact with brands and have experiences around them. I'm not going to follow McDonalds. I'm not going to subscribe to the McDonalds E-mail newsletter. I'm not going to read posts on Twitter from the official McDonalds social media editor. I'm not looking for relevant McDonalds products. I'm not even fucking thinking about you, McDonalds. That goes for all brands, not just them. I wish companies could just back off, offer products, take my money when I buy them, and butt out of my life otherwise.

Some people do though

I’ve been in this long-running battle with a large non-US appliance maker about their app. I live in a humid place and find notifications that a load is finished in the washer so I can move it quickly to the dryer very useful.

Unfortunately this company has decided to layer on at least one daily notification reminding me to think about all the value their product can bring me. This notification is not strictly marketing, because there’s no buy action anywhere, but it is most certainly the sort of “pay attention to meeeee” whine you commonly see in the most insecure boys.

The thing is that they seem absolutely BAFFLED that anyone wouldn’t want these messages. They cannot conceive that a consumer doesn’t give a shit about their washer/dryer except as a purely functional device. They want to be part of the family, the sort of thing where I think “Gosh I love my wife. Gosh I love my child. Gosh I love my dog. God damn I love my washing machine.” They genuinely believe people think like this. It’s sad and hilarious at the same time.

I love… lamp.

I love lamp!

As an aside, I think you could get a smart plug that would support a 15 amp load that could give you a notification if the load went away. Might not be perfect, but just reading about having a relationship with a washing machine in a theoretical, second-party kind of sense makes me angry :)

Aren't all washed cycles the same time? Can't you just use a timer? That's what I do. My washer always takes 44 mins

My washer has this 'Eco' mode, that is supposed to optimize time, water, and energy usage based on load weight and how dirty my clothes are. It finishes anywhere between 30 to 50ish minutes. Same settings an d all.

Then you set your alarm to fifty minutes ? Surely the max twenty minutes the laundry spends in the washing machine won’t make a difference.

>Aren't all washed cycles the same time?

No, not at all. It's not really possible unless you're using an extremely basic washer with no spin (Or a very poor spin) cycle. A lot of the reason washers are terrible at estimating how long a wash cycle is going to be is because they spend a variable amount of time balancing the clothes before the spin cycle.

My speed queen is always the same. But that might be because it's a commercial offering

It's likely because of a much slower spin cycle, which is typical of commercial washing machines.

Not only does my washer have different cycle times but I get lost in whatever I’m doing and hours pass lol.

Setting up home assistant to send push notifications via Smart plug amperage changes sounds like a great way to begin a long term committed relationship with your appliances

Edit: what the other guy said. I have a diver watch I just spin the dial to see how much time has passed since I started something. One time at the height of my Arduino hackery I didn't have a tea kettle and just boiled water in a sauce pan and said to my roommate, I bet I can shine a laser on the surface of the water to detect when it's boiling and make a noise, she laughs and says congrats you've invented a more complicated whistling kettle. Really humbling experience.

(Having said that, I still think about Steak-Umms more than I ever expected because of their deeply satisfying twitter presence, though I’ve never knowingly purchased a steak-umm.)

But the most successful brands are those that infest your life and which it is almost impossible to detach from. How much money and for how many years have you paid interest to "your" bank, for example? Could you switch to another bank? Have you tried?

I can easily switch banks in a day. Not crypto-heavy either. No loans, insurance, contracts with set date. Are there any other reasons why switching is hard?

Same. The most longstanding brands in my life are literally the ones I forget about.

I think you have no idea.

Sure, that's you, but to think no consumers want this kind of relationship with at least some brands, is ignorance.

You're on the right side of the bell curve. Marketing works best on the left side of the bell curve.

Marketers are what happens when you take the love and dedication that craftsmen have for their creations and separate it from the actual creation process.

They don't make the product, so their love can't actually make it better by including small human touches, or iterating.

They're not sales or traders, so they don't have to care about the nitty gritty of procurement or costs to customers.

All they have & need is excitement.

This would be fine if they were customers, but they're not so its all very parasocial.

Unfortunately a lot of people aren't like that. Corporate/brand loyalty is definitely a thing, and not just for products, for all sorts of extraneous reasons. For example, I know people who will buy whatever game Larian and Remedy produce next, and boycott anything EA makes, regardless of the quality or even the genre.

I used to work at a US healthcare company selling a product that doctors prescribe in a medical consultation in a serious medical context that occurs very rarely in a person's life. Everything the marketing/product side of the company did was predicated on the notion that the product would be something that people would have an emotional connection to and would be an important part of people's mental landscapes for a non-trivial proportion of their lifetime.

Given that the product people concerned must have accepted that the people involved (the patients) would have hundreds or thousands of involvements of similar profundity with other commercial products, I'm not sure what's more worrying: the misjudgement of the role of medicine, or the implication that they think that normal people's brains are teeming with 1000s of emotional attachments to random commercial products.

I absolutely know people who love companies and products. Like LOVE them, they will be put into tears like a child at Christmas, but they're adults. They grew up with them or their family members died and those companies or products bring back those memories. They played their favorite game while eating that food, etc.

You never know. I'm not sure I've ever loved a company exactly, but I've really really liked a product, or sometimes just a type of food. If I like a certain food enough and only a certain company sells it, some of that feeling relates with the company too. Like the company cheers you up, BECAUSE they sell it. You can see how that might be valuable in spreading appeal for the company and helping preserve the thing you enjoy, so it has social/natural selection value.

I think when companies refer to this, they really are referring to real people, it's just aspirational that other people could feel that way if they let themselves. Most people won't.

I think most people can identify a few products they love

If you have a sufficiently broad definition of 'product', then yes.

Millions of people are passionate about brands like the "Dallas Cowboys" and "Star Wars" and will dress up in costumes and go to events with like-minded people.

But for normal products, like USB headsets? Nobody's dressing up as the Jabra 20 Stereo USB-C Headset to go to the big Jabra Convention.

> If you have a sufficiently broad definition of 'product', then yes.... people are passionate about brands like the "Dallas Cowboys" and "Star Wars"....

Some people are passionate about coffee, others knitting. I'm not sure it's a broad definition of product you need, but more like a broader definition of people. They probably don't all fit into your sports nerd bubble. Most people are passionate about something.

I have brands/products I love, but I love them because I trust them, and typically my trust of something is inversely correlated with seeing mainstream marketing for it.

I agree...but I also think it's a slow path to monetize OpenAI if they don't support some kind of channel to get paid by the sell-side. At least they offer a subscription and didn't jump to this as the only option. I'm optimistic that a premium tier can exist that avoids this, but we'll see. The reality is that they need the money.

> it's a slow path to monetize OpenAI if they don't support some kind of channel to get paid by the sell-side.

Seems like an express route to irrelevance, to me.

If I wanted AI-generated shill reviews, written without laying eyes on the product, hoping to get me to click on an affiliate link? I'd go to Google.

Yeah, miss good ol' mom, gradma talk: you (should) love people; things you like them.

It means the enshittification is reaching full acceleration. The MBAs have taken over. It'll be a constant battle between monetization and research, and a continual skewing of research and development as unnecessary expenses, followed by a full-on torching of the reputation in return for fast cash now and trading on vibes thereafter, while the rest of the world moves on.

Sama wants to speedrun the Apple arc, it looks like.

The MBAs have taken over a place that calls itself HackerNews.

Imagine if the company has AI in its name.

This is a brilliant idea. I'm going to mail 99999999 people about my new MBAI degree offering!

For only $6666 you too can become part of the new Mega Banana Annihilation Infantry – the secret task force fighting rogue potassium. Success guaranteed!

Buy now!

And investors will be genuinely surprised when the whole thing falls apart in 36 months and the still-very-rich founder spends the next 16 years giving uncomfortably veiny public talks about some uncomfortably sociopathic thing he’s become fascinated with and everyone tries to pretend is totally normal.

It doesnt take an MBA to figure out that selling stuff, or facilitating the sale of stuff, has value. The techies are the ones who built it, the whole "MBA" idea is a coping mechanism to deflect from your own (assuming you're some kind of techie/programmer) participation.

Blame Apple, I think they started it decades ago. And yes some people really do love their products.

I think it goes back way farther than that. Look at car ads from the 1950s and 60s, for example. They give off that romantic vibe.

No doubt. I was thinking Volkswagen, but I'm not sure if that was about love so much as just evoking emotion and humour with design. Apple is the earliest I can relate to at least. My first 13" Mackbook Air was perfect. You definitely see people who cherish their car (Ferris Bueller Ferrari comes to mind).

It's true only for a select few products that are actually elite. Like Apple or Dyson.

Tangent to your point, but I think Dyson is generally considered to be overpriced for what it is. Shark and Kenmore are just as good by most metrics and are less expensive, whereas if you want reliable products then you get Miele or Sebo. Dyson's one selling point is that they're typically close to or on the cutting edge of technology, so they're the best if you value noise and size more than price and reliability.

I have a product I love - it's a barbecue sauce. I buy it from a fella in Texas who ships the bottles in boxes he clearly packs himself (often the bottles have personal thank you notes with my name written on them in sharpie.) Wouldn't call it "elite"

That sounds pretty elite to me. I didn't mean it as elitist.

Johnny is frowning right now.

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