Comment by zachrose | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zachrose | Hacker News Reader

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Have you ever seen a good movie? Think for a second about that movie. What made it good?

Now imagine if you could make that movie even better for yourself. Imagine this movie was distributed along with a plastic box with a few knobs and dials on it. Wouldn't it be a better movie if you could turn the knobs to adjust the parameters of the movie -- there really aren't that many fundamental parameters to movies. You could adjust the heights of the actors, or the amount of furniture in a scene, or the physicality of risk and harm that characters endured, or even just add more redheads.

What if that box also asked what kind of movie you're in the mood for, or who your other favorite directors are. Then the movie could switch out some plot elements and style decisions to become a little bit more like another movie you wanted to watch.

Or what if instead of watching one particular movie you could just add movies together. Like say you wanted to watch Terminator 2, but alternating scenes with Clueless. Or maybe you could just put picture-in-picture, with all your favorite movies together on the same screen!

How great would that be!

What if the movie came with the full set of trailers (preview, theatrical, etc.) for the movie? And had a director's commentary track? With a second audio track that had the actors telling jokes? Or even just take all of the funny moments that happened while filming, where people missed their lines, and put them on the same DVD? Maybe they could even throw in an entirely different ending for the movie that was replaced or removed late in the process?

Seriously: I appreciate the point you are trying to make here, but you chose a horrible example that I think actually argues that adding random features isn't a big deal :/. Besides, they already claim to have a bunch of features planned anyway: it isn't like the developers are seemingly of the "this is the exact app that should be released, and there should be no random additions or extra features added, as doing so would ruin the whole experience"...

> The next couple planned releases on our roadmap will heavily rely on native iOS functions and code to include things like tagging, additional graph views and scrubbing, ability to add media. etc... And by eventually letting people combine their data, you will be able to see how their relative happiness aligns to other users, a neighborhood and even the world.

(It is also possible, however, that I totally misunderstood your response, and you are actually saying that having a happiness index that you kept track of on a moment-to-moment basis while watching a movie would let you optimize the movie according to your personal tastes. I feel like that's lower probability--more dots need connecting for that--but if I did actually misunderstand your comment I'm sorry that my response just adds to the confusion.)

I guess what I'm getting at is that some of the nicest things in this world are what they are because of spaces not filled in, or aspects that aren't shoved into tropes, or—if you'll excuse the cliché—notes not played.

I think we're all in agreement that this sounds like a cool app. I'm just lamenting the lack of creative authority given to its developers, regardless of whatever their future plans may be.

Yet throwing in an instrumental version of the song seems to generally work out fine (or an alternative version that is a duet with Rihanna); you seem to be stuck on "there are bad things that can be added to something that make it worse" when you are simply plucking examples chosen to be uniquely the most bad, even when there are obvious examples that no one has a problem with for the exact same cases that no one has a problem with (and are even semi-expected these days).

I mean, a movie release on DVD with just be movie and nothing more is simply not done and many people would consider it cheap and disappointing. The reaction most people who have to a movie that is only 20 minutes long is or a song that was only 30 seconds long is going to be similar: I doubt many movie theaters, radio stations, or content distributors, would consider the "short" sufficient.

In this case, we know the developers have "notes left to play", and could spend the time to do those now. Clearly, I would be the first to point at Apple and say "this is not a legitimate selection criteria" (sufficiently so that even bothering to say it explicitly is kind if redundant ;P), but if I were those developers... this is just a really self-defeating reaction that is not likely to sway either Apple or the people who actually like Apple not wanting to sell things that don't feel "complete enough".

> What if the movie came with the full set of trailers (preview, theatrical, etc.) [...] could even throw in an entirely different ending for the movie [...]

Awesome idea! Throw this in a locked device with some kind of DRM to make sure our viewer has a fully immersive uniform experience, and I'm ready to throw my life savings at it.

(Apologies for that, I couldn't resist pointing out to you where that train of thought has taken the market. ;) )

DVDs seem to still be selling pretty well, despite utterly and completely broken DRM.

That would be legitimately great. See, for example, The Phantom Edit, or Brokeback to the Future, or Girl Talk's All Day.

Could you rephrase your comment without the sarcasm so I can see what point you're actually trying to make?

All those features are hogshit, completely irrelevant, and extremely complicated and difficult to achieve. I have never once watched a movie and said "I didn't like that movie. Let me watch it again with taller actors and more rounded furniture."

You don't have to. But those features might allow someone else to mash it up into something better. Like the three examples in my comment.

It would probably work out awful. To quote Ford :

"If I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse"

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